The Alien and Sedition Acts were four federal laws passed by Congress in the summer of 1798 and signed by President John Adams. They lengthened the wait for citizenship, gave the President power to detain or deport non-citizens, and made it a crime to publish “false, scandalous and malicious” criticism of the federal government. Three of the four expired or were repealed within a few years. The fourth, the Alien Enemies Act, is still on the books and was invoked as recently as 2025.1National Archives. Alien and Sedition Acts (1798)
The laws grew out of an undeclared naval conflict with France known as the Quasi-War and out of Federalist alarm at a wave of European immigrants who tended to vote for the opposition Democratic-Republicans. The Federalist-controlled Congress passed all four acts within weeks of one another.
What Each of the Four Laws Did
The Naturalization Act
The Naturalization Act (1 Stat. 566) raised the residency requirement for U.S. citizenship from five years to fourteen and required applicants to file a declaration of intent five years before applying, up from three.2Library of Congress. Alien and Sedition Acts – Primary Documents in American History3Constitution Annotated. ArtI.S8.C4.1.2.3 Early U.S. Naturalization Laws It also barred naturalization for anyone from a country at war with the United States and required every non-citizen already in the country to register with a local official. Failure to register could block a later citizenship application.
The Alien Friends Act
The Alien Friends Act (1 Stat. 570) let the President deport any non-citizen he personally judged dangerous to the peace and safety of the country, or whom he suspected of secret plots against the government.4GovInfo. 1 Stat. 570 – An Act Concerning Aliens There was no hearing, no trial, and no judicial review. A written order was enough. Anyone who refused to leave, or who returned after removal, faced imprisonment. The act was written to expire two years after passage, and Adams never formally invoked it, though some French nationals reportedly left on their own.
The Alien Enemies Act
The Alien Enemies Act (1 Stat. 577) applied only during a declared war or an invasion of American territory. Once the President issued a public proclamation, non-naturalized citizens of the enemy nation — originally males aged fourteen and older — could be arrested, detained on terms the President set, and removed from the country.5GovInfo. 1 Stat. 577 – An Act Respecting Alien Enemies Unlike the other three acts, it carried no expiration date.
The Sedition Act
The Sedition Act (1 Stat. 596) was the most politically charged of the four. It created two offenses. The first punished conspiracies to oppose government measures or to intimidate federal officials, with fines up to $5,000 and prison terms between six months and five years. The second, more commonly charged, punished anyone who published or spoke “false, scandalous and malicious” statements against the government, Congress, or the President, with fines up to $2,000 and up to two years in prison.6GovInfo. 1 Stat. 596 – An Act in Addition to the Act, Entitled An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes Against the United States Defendants could argue the truth of their statements as a defense, and juries could weigh both law and facts.
How the Sedition Act Was Used
At least twenty-six people were prosecuted under the Sedition Act between 1798 and 1801. Every journalist charged was an editor of a Democratic-Republican newspaper. No Federalist publisher was ever charged.7Federal Judicial Center. The Sedition Act Trials
The best-known defendant was Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont, a Democratic-Republican who had accused President Adams of an “unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp.” A Federalist-appointed judge sentenced him to four months in prison and a $1,000 fine. His constituents reelected him to Congress while he was still in jail.8Federal Judicial Center. The Sedition Act Trials Editors Thomas Cooper and James Callender were also convicted and imprisoned for their attacks on the Adams administration.
Federal judges hearing the cases were Federalist appointees, and the “truth” defense proved hard to use against opinions about political conduct. Fines that look small today could shut a small print shop, and imprisonment silenced presses for months at a stretch.
The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions
The sharpest challenge to the Acts came from state legislatures, not federal courts. Thomas Jefferson secretly drafted the Kentucky Resolutions in 1798, and James Madison authored the Virginia Resolutions the same year.
Jefferson argued that the Constitution was a compact among sovereign states and that federal acts exceeding delegated powers were “unauthoritative, void, and of no force,” with each state holding “an equal right to judge for itself” when the federal government had gone too far.9Avalon Project. Draft of the Kentucky Resolutions – October 1798 A later version named “nullification” as “the rightful remedy.” Madison, in more measured terms, wrote that states “have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil” in cases of “deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise” of ungranted powers.10Avalon Project. Virginia Resolution – Alien and Sedition Acts No other state legislature endorsed the resolutions at the time. The nullification theory they introduced would resurface decades later in the arguments over slavery and secession.
Expiration, the Election of 1800, and Jefferson’s Pardons
The Sedition Act contained a sunset clause that ended it on March 3, 1801, the last day of Adams’s term.11Avalon Project. An Act in Addition to the Act, Entitled An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes Against the United States The Alien Friends Act expired two years after passage. Public anger at the Sedition Act prosecutions helped drive the Federalists from power in the election of 1800.
Jefferson won the presidency and pardoned everyone convicted under the Sedition Act, calling the law “a nullity, as absolute and as palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image.” Congress later repaid the fines collected under it. In 1802, the new Democratic-Republican Congress cut the Naturalization Act’s fourteen-year residency requirement back to five years.12Legal Information Institute. Early U.S. Naturalization Laws The Supreme Court never ruled on the Sedition Act’s constitutionality because no convicted defendant appealed, but in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), Justice William Brennan wrote that “the attack upon its validity has carried the day in the court of history.”13Justia Law. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964)
The Alien Enemies Act Today
The Alien Enemies Act is the only one of the four still in force. It is codified at 50 U.S.C. § 21 and still lets the President detain and remove non-naturalized residents of a hostile nation during a declared war or invasion. A 1918 amendment removed the original male-only limitation.14Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 50 U.S. Code 21 – Restraint, Regulation, and Removal
Its most consequential use came during World War II. President Franklin Roosevelt issued Proclamation 2525 on December 7, 1941, invoking the act against Japanese nationals in the United States, and issued similar proclamations covering German and Italian nationals. Those proclamations were one of the legal bases for the wartime internment of foreign nationals.15The American Presidency Project. Proclamation 2525 – Alien Enemies, Japanese
In March 2025, President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act for the first time outside of a congressionally declared war. Proclamation 10903 stated that members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua were “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion” against the United States and directed that Venezuelan nationals aged fourteen and older who belonged to the organization be apprehended and removed as alien enemies.16The White House. Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua The proclamation applied a statute written 227 years earlier for conflicts between sovereign nations to a non-state criminal organization.