Since the current administration began rolling out its draconian immigration policies, people have frequently cited the WWII Exclusion and Incarceration of Japanese Americans as a historical precedent, especially Trump’s invocation of the 1798 wartime Alien Enemies Act.
But we can most loudly hear echoes of wartime repression of Japanese Americans in an entirely different area of Trump policies. It’s a historical symmetry that remains largely unremarked, in part because it rests on an often overlooked aspect of our nation’s 1940s constitutional crisis: Of the 120,000 people of Japanese descent whom our government sent to American concentration camps, approximately two-thirds were fellow citizens. Almost 100,000 of our countrymen were stripped of their civil and Constitutional rights and then locked away behind barbed wire for years with no due process, nor even any reliable evidence of danger. The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 did not even apply to them—though in the end, this made no difference.
Trump launched his second term with attacks on another group of fellow citizens: transgender Americans. On his first day back in office, he signed Executive Order EO 14168, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” This document frames transgender identity as a threat to both individual Americans and society at large. “Policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male,” it asserts, protect both “women’s rights” and “freedom of conscience,” the latter a term so vague it could mean anything—or everything.
Conversely, the EO ascribes danger to Americans whose gender identities do not match what we expect from their biology. According to the order, these citizens “invalida[te] the true and biological category of ‘woman’” and thereby damage “longstanding, cherished legal rights and values.” EO 14168 was just the first of a slew of anti-trans Executive Orders and Acts in 2025, including a military ban of transgender troops that on May 6, the Supreme Court allowed to proceed, at least for now. All of these acts and orders posit inextricable links between “sex” as an immutable biological binary, individual and national security, and an ethical social order; The military ban asserts that the “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with…an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.”
Almost 100,000 of our fellow citizens were stripped of their civil and Constitutional rights and then locked away behind barbed wire for years…
The vehemence of this anti-trans craze—its obsession with identifying the biological “truth” of fellow citizens in order to judge their morality and rights—might seem new. But Trump’s EO 14168, and the resulting 850+ legislative efforts already in 2025 that build on it, replay events prefacing and enforcing the 1942-1945 forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans—what we now consider among the darkest chapters of our national history. This wartime injustice, a gradual stripping of citizens’ existing rights and protections, rested largely on beliefs about how biology determined one’s right to civil liberties—in the name of protecting national values and society at large.
A similar dynamic is once again unfolding. In 2020, the United States Supreme Court ruled that federal civil rights law protected gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination. But on February 28, 2025, following EO 14168’s new definitions of “sex,” biology, and civil rights, Iowa’s governor Kim Reynolds signed bill HF 583 into law. The bill strikes “gender identity” from the state’s Civil Rights act covering discrimination in education, housing, employment, credit practices, and more. Now, transgender citizens have lost a preexisting civil right in Iowa, and discrimination against them is legal in that state.
Other state legislatures rapidly followed suit. Missouri’s Senate bill 76 and Oregon’s House bill 2439 both seek to strike the term or concept of “gender identity” from legal statutes banning discrimination. Other bills, such as Georgia Senate Bill 36, called “Georgia Religious Freedom Restoration Act” and signed into law on April 4, 2025, could ultimately legalize discrimination more circuitously; It restricts protections that “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless “in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest.” For trans Americans, this last clause provides little solace, since Trump’s executive orders have repeatedly framed their rights as far less than “compelling”—or even real. These legislative actions coincide with widespread efforts to remove trans Americans from the public sphere through such acts as bathroom bans, canceling of travel documents, and erasure of monuments and policies reflecting gender diversity.
On the basis of nothing more than their ethnicity—in other words, their perceived biology—a new class of fellow citizen had been created, whose civil liberties our government claimed the freedom to strip at will.
Eighty three years ago, though a different community was targeted, they were targeted in much the same way. Like the breadth and variety of anti-trans legislation occurring now, the scope of actions against Japanese Americans remains difficult to summarize concisely, but a few highlights follow:
On January 5, 1942, less than a month after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military officially classified American selective service registrants of Japanese descent as “enemy aliens.” (Those already serving had their weapons removed and were reassigned to grunt roles or dismissed.) On March 24, Western Defense Command announced Public Proclamation No. 3, mandating a curfew, travel restrictions, and other regulations on German, Italian, and Japanese aliens, as well as on American citizens of Japanese descent. On the basis of nothing more than their ethnicity—in other words, their perceived biology—a new class of fellow citizen had been created whose civil liberties our government claimed the freedom to strip at will.
As a group, Japanese Americans posed no particular threat, a truth confirmed well before their exclusion by U.S. Navy intelligence reports. But an overweening chorus of voices—from legislators, media, and civilian organizations—declared that, unlike white citizens of German and Italian descent, danger lurked in Japanese American bodies. As General John DeWitt famously argued, the “Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on American soil…have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.”
Three days after Public Proclamation No. 3, Public Proclamation No. 4 mandated the forced evacuation and detention of West Coast Japanese Americans, both aliens and citizens, on 48 hour notice. An estimated 80,000-90,000 American citizens of Japanese descent were thus forcibly removed, ultimately placed in inland concentration camps, where most remained incarcerated throughout the war. No mass removal of German or Italian Americans occurred.
The justifications for targeting Japanese Americans relied on supposed connections between biology, morality, and national safety. Thus, Japanese Americans as a so-called “race,” and not just those based on the West Coast, became targets. On February 26, 1942, Senator Tom Stewart argued for stripping rights, citizenship, and freedom purely on the basis of biology, filing bill S. 2293, “directing the Secretary of War to take into custody and restrain” all Japanese Americans “in the United States and its Territories.” He elaborated, “the Japanese born on American soil should not be allowed citizenship…They are cowardly and immoral…[and] different from Americans in every conceivable way.”
Other legislative efforts throughout the war sought not just to strip Japanese Americans’ civil rights and freedoms, but also to deport them, to “rid our country of representatives of an alien race,” as one Oregon representative announced on the House floor; “A race who are barbaric at heart…We are as far apart as the poles….They are yellow, we are white.”
The justifications for targeting Japanese Americans relied on supposed connections between biology, morality, and national safety.
This obsession linking biology, morality, and public safely, reached its apex with the U.S. government’s Mixed Blood Policy in the camps for Japanese Americans. This policy mandated which families of mixed ethnicity could be freed and under what conditions. The smaller the percentage of “Japanese blood,” the less menace a citizen was assumed to pose. Beyond “blood percentage,” camp administrators promoted incarcerees’ request for release based on attempts to read biological markers. One official supported release of two mixed-race brothers by noting they were “definitely Caucasian in appearance.” In backing the release of a native Japanese woman married to a white American man, another official—defying logic—wrote, “Her appearance is that of Chinese,” adding for good measure, “her mannerism is more Americanized.”
All of these actions were supposedly undertaken the shield the nation from a tiny minority who posed no specific risk. As government researchers eventually noted, America’s concentration camps were ones “the government had hastily built to protect 130 million Americans against 60,000 of their fellow citizens and their resident alien parents.” With the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, Congress named this history both a “grave injustice” and “failure of political leadership.”
All of these actions were supposedly undertaken the shield the nation from a tiny minority who posed no specific risk… Eventually, Congress named this history both a “grave injustice” and “failure of political leadership.”
Transgender Americans similarly represent less than 1% of our population today. Of course, the exclusion of West Coast Japanese American citizens coincided with mass incarceration, a literal removal of an entire community from society. To those who say this couldn’t happen to the group of Americans whose gender identity conflicts with EO 14168’s notions of “biological truth” and safety—that the “exclusion” or erasure of these Americans does not extend to literal lockup—we need only look towards Texas. On March 5, 2025, H.B. 3817 was introduced: “An Act relating to creating the criminal offense of gender identity fraud,” defined as a “verbal or written statement…identifying the person ’s biological sex as the opposite of the biological sex assigned to the person at birth,” and a felony punishable by jail.
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Tracy Slater’s Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp is available in July from Chicago Review Press.
