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.