The US Used the Alien Enemies Act to Detain Their Families. Now, They Are Watching History Repeat.
The statute justified the imprisonment in World War II of thousands like Heidi Gurcke Donald. She is horrified as Trump invokes it for mass deportation.
Isabela Dias
Heidi Gurcke Donald does not remember much about the Crystal City family internment camp in South Texas. She was barely three at the time. But Donald can picture certain moments. There were the floodlights, atop the barbed-wire fence, shining through the curtains her mother had sewn for the bedroom windows; the nursery school singing game in which she and her younger sister played Sleeping Beauty in the middle of a circle as the other kids stood tall and held their hands together in the air to form a hedge; the icicle her German-born father snapped from the edge of the roof on a frigid winter and offered on a cracked plate.
The Gurcke family was among the first group of German nationals and Latin Americans of German origin deported from Costa Rica to arrive in Texas in February 1943. They had been rounded up and shipped away as part of a secretive transnational State Department program known as Special War Problems. The hope was to trade “enemy aliens”’ in exchange for American hostages. Through the initiative, the US government orchestrated the uprooting of more than 6,000 Germans, Italians, and Japanese—connected through citizenship or ancestry to the Axis countries—residing in Latin America and sent them to domestic internment camps across the United States.
As Donald would later document in her memoir, We Were Not the Enemy: Remembering the United States’ Latin-American Civilian Internment Program of World War II, the Gurckes became “one of many caught in the far-flung net cast by US authorities seeking the enemy.” After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt’s proclamations authorized broad detentions premised on promoting hemispheric security. “They swept up all of us,” Donald said in an oral history interview conducted by the Texas Historical Commission in 2009 “with none of us being serious threats of any sort.”
Now, Donald, and descendants of those interned during World War II, are watching as the same law that authorized the imprisonments then is used again by President Donald Trump—this time without the United States at war and with the goal of speeding up mass deportation.
On March 14, President Donald Trump quietly signed a presidential proclamation invoking the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The 18th-century statute gives the president extraordinary powers to summarily detain and remove noncitizens from a foreign country during a “declared war” or while under an “invasion or predatory incursion.” Last used during World War II, the law served as the legal rationale behind the forced relocation and internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans, as well as people of German and Italian descent.
As we previously reported, the Trump administration has long spoken of using the ancient wartime statute to justify hasty deportations, arguing migrants are leading an “invasion” of the United States. The executive order states that alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua—which the administration previously designated as a foreign terrorist organization—are “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions” in coordination with or “at the direction” of the regime of Nicolás Maduro and therefore operating as a de facto government.
In a lawsuit filed on March 15 challenging the executive order as unlawful, the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward argue the Alien Enemies Act—which has only been used three times before, always in times of war—can’t be deployed against citizens of a country, in this instance Venezuela, that isn’t engaging in “warlike actions” against the United States. As a result of the proclamation, the class action complaint states, “countless Venezuelans are at imminent risk of deportation without any hearing or meaningful review, regardless of their ties to the United States or the availability of claims for relief from and defenses to removal.”
By invoking the centuries-old statute during peacetime, the organizations further claim, the president is trying to supercharge mass deportations while sidestepping the judicial process. “The Trump administration’s intent to use a wartime authority for immigration enforcement is as unprecedented as it is lawless,” Lee Gelernt, lead counsel and deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement. “It may be the administration’s most extreme measure yet, and that is saying a lot.”
US District Judge James Boasberg in Washington, DC, issued a temporary restraining order stopping the removal of Venezuelans based on the proclamation and instructed that deportation planes should be turned around. The Trump administration reportedly ignored the court order, deporting 137 Venezuelans to El Salvador—to be held in a notorious prison—under the wartime authority. (The administration said flights had already departed the United States.) “The White House welcomes that fight,” one official told Axios. “This is headed to the Supreme Court. And we’re going to win.” On appeal, the Department of Justice argued the federal judge’s decision violated the president’s inherent authority to remove those determined to be national security threats.
As Katherine Yon Ebright, a counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program explained, the US government has previously used the Alien Enemies Act to target noncitizens deemed “dangerous” solely based on their identity. In reaction to the Trump administration’s proclamation, she lamented that former internees and family members have “to watch their country fail to learn from the mistakes of its past.”
“I think my mother would have been completely terrified by this,” Donald says. “It’s what happened to us, only on steroids.”
In the 1920s, Donald’s father, Werner Gurcke, and her uncle Karl Oskar chose to relocate from Hamburg to Costa Rica. Werner married US citizen Starr Pait in 1936, and they settled in the capital San José, where Donald and her sister Ingrid were born. Werner set up a thriving enterprise as a middleman for imported goods. But by 1941, amidst growing concern of the Axis powers establishing a foothold in the region, the British and US governments blacklisted Werner and Karl. “I’m still an American,” Starr wrote in a letter to a friend at the time “and have written to the Government stating our innocence of any conspiring against it.”
Both men were jailed in July 1942 despite no evidence of their sympathy for or association with the Nazi regime. Later, an independent investigation would show that Werner was considered one of the “most dangerous German nationals” in the country partly because he had been treasurer of the local German Club. “People were just picked up because the neighbor down the street thought they were bad guys or somebody had heard what they thought was the sound of secret meetings late at night as they were passing by,” Donald says. “They were German and therefore they must be enemies.”
That December in 1942, the police took Starr and the girls to the German club, where they were holding the wives and children of those detained. The family was then made to board an overcrowded ship to the United States. Passengers had their passports confiscated and, without documents, were charged with illegal entry upon docking in California. After undergoing interrogation, they were handed identification numbers and put on a train to Crystal City, where a Popeye tribute served as a marker of the small desert town’s status as “spinach center of the world.” They entered the vast camp, once a migrant labor site, on February 12, 1943.
In a photo taken not long after the family’s arrival, a white-blonde Donald sits by her father. She’s not looking at the camera, instead eyeing her sister, both sick from whooping cough. The mug shot of the “Gurcke family criminals,” as Donald calls it, mirrors a similar photo she has seen of an interned Japanese Peruvian family. “The same exhaustion in the parents’ eyes and the same wariness in the children’s faces,” she says.
Donald didn’t learn the full story of her family’s ordeal and the impact it had on her parents until adulthood. Her father didn’t talk about it when she was growing up. Having lost his business and determined to provide for his family, Werner became a workaholic and a chain smoker, passing away from lung cancer in his early sixties. “It consumed him,” she says. Eventually, Donald decided to ask her octogenarian mother, who couldn’t recount what they had gone through without crying. “It was the most terrible experience in her life, and I hadn’t even been aware of it.”
Like Donald, Conrad Caspari had to puzzle together the events that led to his German-born father, Fritz, being sent to the Tuna Canyon Detention Station, in the Los Angeles area, in September 1942. He studied a 120-page FBI case file obtained through public records request and other documents found in his parents’ basement. Caspari learned how flimsy the evidence the US government had against Fritz, who opposed Hitler’s totalitarian rule, was: One of the allegations accused him of sharing intelligence about high-power transmission lines with German authorities; in reality, his father had been followed by agents who mistook his harmonica for a mirror to send a Morse code message.
“The charges were essentially the result of a lot of hysteria,” Caspari says. His father would be acquitted and released in January 1943. But, not without losing his teaching job in the United States. “People’s livelihoods were taken from them without any good reason.”
Caspari, a director on the board of the Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition, fears the Alien Enemies Act can be similarly weaponized again, unless repealed. “When you allow the rule of law to disappear for one group of people in the country,” he says “it will soon disappear for everybody, and then we lose everything which we believe the United States should stand for.”
The grandson of a Tuna Canyon detainee, Colorado-based researcher Russell Endo has looked into the files of 500 Japanese arrested in Southern California in the 1940s and found no indication of subversive acts or allegiance to imperial Japan. “The people were completely innocent,” he says. “But they were swept up because of the abuse of the Alien Enemies Act.”
Endo, who grew up in the vicinity of the former detention camp, sees another parallel between the wartime period and the current moment: the impulse for the mass arrests had to do with public pressure for the federal government to respond forcefully to the attack on Pearl Harbor, all in the name of safety and national security. “If that argument sounds familiar today,” Endo says “it’s because history is repeating itself.”
After the Gurckes were released from Crystal City in May 1944, they moved to Starr’s family beach house in Santa Cruz, California. A government review later found no evidence that Werner engaged in pro-Nazi activity. Still, he remained at risk of repatriation because of the illegal entry charge until 1948, when the US government granted him suspension of deportation. Four years later, Werner became an American citizen.
Donald still lives near the beach house. “Maybe that’s how I’m affected,” she says. “I’ve stayed very close to the first safe place that I knew.”
In 2002, Donald, her sister Ingrid, and their husbands returned to the site of the Crystal City camp for the first time to join a former internees’ reunion. The siblings sat by what used to be the swimming pool, one of the only remaining features of the original place. Realizing that, unlike their parents, they both could freely walk away, they were overcome with emotion.
Donald co-founded the German American Internee Coalition to preserve this lesser-known history. Over the years, many families have contacted the organization looking for information about the unknown fate of their relatives, even decades later. One case stuck with her: an 80-year-old woman who had been just a child when her father was taken away and the family never heard from him again. Although the group couldn’t help her, they have offered leads to others.
“It’s dying just like we are,” Donald says. “We’re going to be a memory fairly soon and we haven’t done all we wanted to do, which was to prevent something like what’s happening today from happening again to another group of people.” She adds: “I know to some extent what these people that are now being targeted for pickup and sending off are going to go through not because I remember it, but because I feel it.”
