Dear MoveOn member,
Donald Trump is expected to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to authorize the summary deportation of immigrants.1
The 227-year-old wartime law gives the president the unchecked power to arrest and deport immigrants—all without a court hearing or due process.2
The heinous law has been used only three times in U.S. history: the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II.3 The law is best known for its role in Japanese internment—a horrifying time in our nation’s history when the U.S. government forcibly kidnapped and incarcerated 120,000 people of Japanese descent, including U.S. citizens, in concentration camps.4
We are barreling toward a dictatorship. But tyranny cannot prevail over people who refuse to succumb to it.
In these dangerous and precarious times, MoveOn members across the country are fighting back.
Will you start a $5 monthly donation to MoveOn to help ratchet up and sustain our work to help bring about the downfall of the Trump regime while building the grassroots movement to build a better future for all of us?
Yes, I’ll chip in $5 a month. If you’ve saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately.
No, I’m sorry, I can’t make a monthly donation.
Chandra, we are already seeing the despicable consequences of Trump’s disgusting and anti-immigrant deportation rampage.
NBC News just broke a story about a 10-year-old girl recovering from brain cancer who was deported to Mexico with her undocumented parents.5
The child, who is a U.S. citizen, was detained with her family while they were on their way to Houston for an emergency medical appointment to see the girl’s specialists.6
The family had made the trip from their home to Houston at least five times in the past, passing through an immigration checkpoint every time without any issues. On previous occasions, the parents showed immigration officials letters from their doctors and lawyers and were allowed passage.7
But when Trump took office, the medical letters were not enough. Immigration officials arrested the girl’s parents and—under Trump’s policy wherein “families can be deported together”—the girl and her parents were deported to Mexico.8
According to NBC News, the 10-year-old girl has been unable to receive adequate health care for her brain cancer treatments in Mexico.
This is just one of the many gut-wrenching stories that will come about because of Trump’s deportation rampage.
And it is only going to get significantly worse if and when Trump expands his own powers to indiscriminately deport immigrants by invoking the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
But do not give in to despair or hopelessness.
What happens to our country will come down to us, to our own courage and resolve. To our ability to engage in peaceful protest. To organize and mobilize others. To work against hate and bigotry. To fight for justice and democracy.
Will you start a $5 monthly donation to support MoveOn’s programs to train, organize, and communicate with millions of us all across the country to stop Trump’s hateful regime and build a burgeoning America that serves all of us?
Yes, I’ll chip in $5 a month. If you’ve saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately.
No, I’m sorry, I can’t make a monthly donation.
Thanks for all you do.
–Mia, Julia, Bekir, Chris, and the rest of the team
Sources:
1. “Trump to invoke wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to carry out deportations to Guantanamo,” CBS News, March 13, 2025
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/
2. Ibid.
3. “The Alien Enemies Act, Explained,” Brennan Center for Justice, October 9, 2024
https://www.brennancenter.org/
4. Ibid.
5. “U.S. citizen child recovering from brain cancer removed to Mexico with undocumented parents,” NBC News, March 13, 2025
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
Want to support our work? The MoveOn community will work every moment, day by day and year by year, to resist Trump’s agenda, contain the damage, defeat hate with love, and begin the process of swinging the nation’s pendulum back toward sanity, decency, and the kind of future that we must never give up on. And to do it we need your ongoing support, now more than ever. Will you stand with us?
17 March 2025