Alien and Sedition Acts: Origins, Laws, and Legacy

The Alien and Sedition Acts were four federal laws passed in 1798 that made it harder to become a citizen, gave the president unilateral power to deport non-citizens, and made it a crime to publish criticism of the federal government. Signed by President John Adams during an undeclared naval conflict with France, they were championed by the Federalist majority in Congress and fiercely opposed by Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans. Three of the four laws expired or were repealed by 1802. The fourth, the Alien Enemies Act, is still on the books and was invoked as recently as 2025.

Why Congress Passed Them in 1798

By the late 1790s, revolutionary France was seizing American merchant ships, and a diplomatic mission to Paris had collapsed after French intermediaries demanded bribes before talks could begin. When Adams reported this to Congress, replacing the French officials’ names with the letters W, X, Y, and Z, public anger turned sharply against France and against Americans sympathetic to it.¹

The Federalists who controlled Congress and the presidency used the crisis to move against their political opponents. Recent immigrants, especially Irish and French arrivals, tended to vote Democratic-Republican, and Democratic-Republican newspapers were the loudest critics of the administration. The four laws that emerged addressed both problems: they slowed the path to citizenship, handed the president tools to remove foreigners, and criminalized political attacks on the government.

The Naturalization Act

The Naturalization Act tripled the residency requirement for citizenship, from five years to fourteen, and required a formal declaration of intent at least five years before applying.² The effect was to keep newly arrived immigrants — a reliable source of Democratic-Republican votes — out of the electorate for nearly a decade and a half.

Congress repealed the law in 1802 and restored the five-year residency requirement, which remains the general baseline for naturalization today.³

The Alien Friends Act

The Alien Friends Act let the president deport any non-citizen he personally judged “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” There was no trial, no requirement to present evidence, and no judicial review. The president set the deadline to leave.⁴

A non-citizen who defied a deportation order and was caught still in the country faced up to three years in prison and permanent disqualification from citizenship.⁵ The president could also condition someone’s continued presence on posting a bond, and could revoke that permission at any time. The law reached only nationals of countries not at war with the United States.

It carried a two-year expiration date and lapsed in 1800. There is no recorded instance of Adams using it to deport anyone, though the threat may have driven some French nationals to leave voluntarily.⁴

The Alien Enemies Act

The Alien Enemies Act was the wartime companion to the Alien Friends Act. It authorized the president to detain and remove nationals of any country the United States was at war with, or that had attempted an invasion. As originally written, it reached only males aged fourteen and older; a 1918 amendment extended it to all nationals of hostile nations.⁶⁷

Unlike the other three laws, this one had no sunset clause. It remains in force at 50 U.S.C. §§ 21–24.⁷

Its most consequential use came in World War II. In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Presidential Proclamations 2525, 2526, and 2527, invoking the act to authorize the detention of Japanese, German, and Italian nationals. By war’s end, more than 31,000 suspected enemy aliens and their families had been interned at government facilities.

In March 2025, President Trump invoked the act through Proclamation 10903, targeting Venezuelan nationals aged fourteen and older alleged to be members of the gang Tren de Aragua and present in the United States without naturalization or lawful permanent residency. The Supreme Court took up the invocation in Trump v. J.G.G., holding that people detained under the act are entitled to judicial review of whether they actually qualify as alien enemies and whether the statute is being applied constitutionally. The Court also ruled that detainees must receive notice and a reasonable opportunity to seek habeas corpus relief before being removed.⁸

The Sedition Act

The Sedition Act was the most incendiary of the four. It created two offenses. The first punished conspiracies to impede the operation of federal law or to intimidate federal officers, with a fine of up to $5,000 and six months to five years in prison. The second, which prosecutors used far more often, made it a crime to “write, print, utter, or publish” anything “false, scandalous and malicious” against the government, Congress, or the president. That offense carried a fine of up to $2,000 and up to two years in prison.⁴

Defendants could offer truth as a defense, which was more generous than the common law of seditious libel at the time. Federalists pointed to that provision as proof the law did not suppress the press. In practice, proving the “truth” of a political opinion before a Federalist judge proved nearly impossible.

Federal prosecutors brought charges against at least twenty-six people between 1798 and 1801, almost all of them Democratic-Republican newspaper editors or political figures.⁹ Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont, the first person prosecuted, drew four months in prison and a $1,000 fine after publishing a letter accusing Adams of an “unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp.” Voters reelected him while he was still in jail. The Scottish-born journalist James Callender was convicted in 1800 for a pamphlet attacking Adams, fined $200, and sentenced to nine months.⁴

Congress set the act to expire on March 3, 1801, the last day of Adams’s term. Federalists wanted the law available through the 1800 election campaign, but not in the hands of whoever came next.⁴

The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions

The most organized opposition came from two state legislatures. James Madison secretly drafted the Virginia Resolution; Thomas Jefferson wrote the Kentucky Resolutions. Both argued that the Constitution was a compact among sovereign states and that states could push back when the federal government exceeded its powers.

The Virginia Resolution called the acts “palpable and alarming infractions of the Constitution” and said states were “in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil.”¹⁰ The Kentucky Resolutions went further, using the word “nullification” and asserting that each state had “the unquestionable right to judge” whether federal laws were constitutional.¹¹

No other state legislature endorsed the resolutions at the time. But the theory they introduced resurfaced in the 1830s, when John C. Calhoun cited them as precedent for state nullification of federal tariffs. Madison, still alive, publicly rejected that reading of his argument.

How the Acts Ended

The prosecutions backfired politically. Rather than silencing Democratic-Republicans, they gave the party martyrs and a rallying issue. Jefferson defeated Adams in the 1800 election, and Federalists lost Congress along with the presidency.

Jefferson pardoned everyone convicted under the Sedition Act and remitted their fines, later writing that he “considered, and now consider, that law to be a nullity, as absolute and as palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image.”¹² The Sedition Act had already expired on March 3, 1801, and the Alien Friends Act had lapsed the year before. Congress repealed the Naturalization Act in 1802.³ Congress later repaid the fines collected under the Sedition Act, expressly on the grounds that the law had been unconstitutional.

What the Acts Mean for the Law Today

The Sedition Act was never reviewed by the Supreme Court while it was in force. When the Court finally addressed it, in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), Justice William Brennan wrote that the act had “first crystallized a national awareness of the central meaning of the First Amendment” and that its invalidity was a matter “which no one now doubts.”¹² The Court used that historical repudiation as part of the foundation for the “actual malice” standard that still governs defamation claims by public figures.

The Alien Enemies Act is a different story. It remains available to any president willing to invoke it, and whether it can constitutionally be applied outside a congressionally declared war is a question the federal courts are actively working through in the wake of the 2025 proclamation.

1
Naval History and Heritage Command. Quasi-War with France
2
Library of Congress. Alien and Sedition Acts: Primary Documents in American History
3
Library of Congress. ArtI.S8.C4.1.2.3 Early US Naturalization Laws – Constitution Annotated
4
National Archives. Alien and Sedition Acts (1798)
5
U.S. Law and Race Initiative OER. Alien Friends Act (1798)
6
U.S. Government Publishing Office. 1 Stat. 577 – An Act Respecting Alien Enemies
7
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 50 USC Ch. 3 – Alien Enemies
8
Supreme Court of the United States. Trump v. J.G.G. (04/07/2025)
9
Federal Judicial Center. The Sedition Act Trials
10
The Avalon Project. Virginia Resolution – Alien and Sedition Acts
11
Avalon Project. Kentucky Resolution – Alien and Sedition Acts
12
Justia US Supreme Court. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964)