The Quote Below—More Misinformation from the Media
“President Trump has issued a host of executive orders declaring war on immigrants in this country, including the prospect of mass detention and imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay. Congress has not declared war, and these executive orders will be challenged as unconstitutional and as beyond the power of the president acting by executive order without congressional authorization. Meanwhile, people suffer.
“This is a grim reminder of President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, issued on Feb. 19, 1942. FDR’s order led to the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, 70 percent of whom were American citizens. Given only a week’s notice, they had to pack up what they could carry and report to “assembly centers” before being sent to concentration camps that were freezing in the winter and very hot in the summer. . . .
“It’s not just the courts or the Congress who have choices to make. During the roundup and imprisonment of the Japanese Americans, some other Americans loudly came to their defense. Some quietly supported them. The press mostly failed to call out the injustice, and too many Americans actively supported the roundup out of fear, racial prejudice and bigotry. These of course are the same choices we face today.” — Trump’s Immigration Orders Are Grim Reminder of Japanese Internment, James Purcell, East Bay Times, 2/17/25 [Link]
Fact Check: Trump’s perfectly lawful actions against illegal aliens are no “reminder” whatsoever of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Equating the two situations is patent dishonesty. As the author notes, 70 percent of the Japanese Americans were citizens, and most of the rest were legal residents who were not guilty of crimes. The internment policy violated their rights. Illegal aliens, in contrast, are foreigners whose presence in our country is in violation of our laws. Under our law, they are subject to deportation.
The writer, James Purcell, truly goes off the rails when he claims that Trump is “declaring war on immigrants” when he’s simply enforcing the law. Purcell tries to make his claim sound plausible by using the word “immigrants,” which commonly refers to lawful residents from abroad. Use of the proper term “illegal alien” would reveal the reality of the situation and the propriety of Trump’s enforcement. As a further leap into unreality, the author concludes from his fanciful claim about Trump’s “war” that it’s unconstitutional because Congress hasn’t declared war.
This article expresses the underlying view of illegal alien advocates these days, one which blurs the distinction between citizens and foreigners. If that distinction fades, there remains little basis for America as a distinct country. Is that what the alien advocates really want? They need to answer this question.