The Alien and Sedition Acts: The Four Laws and Their Legacy

The Alien and Sedition Acts were four laws passed by a Federalist-controlled Congress in 1798, during an undeclared naval conflict with France known as the Quasi-War. Together they stretched the wait for citizenship from five years to fourteen, let the president deport non-citizens without a hearing, and made it a crime to publish criticism of the federal government. Three of the four laws expired or were repealed within a few years. The fourth, the Alien Enemies Act, is still federal law and was invoked as recently as 2025.

The Four Laws

The Naturalization Act

Before 1798, an immigrant could apply for citizenship after five years of residence and three years after declaring an intent to naturalize. The Naturalization Act tripled the residency requirement to fourteen years and pushed the declaration-of-intent window to five years before admission.¹ Recent immigrants who might have voted within a few years now faced more than a decade of waiting. Most new arrivals at the time leaned toward the Democratic-Republican opposition, so the partisan effect was direct.

The law did not sunset on its own. Congress repealed it in 1802 after political power shifted, restoring the five-year residency requirement and the three-year declaration period that had existed before.¹ That five-year standard remains the general rule for naturalization today.

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” or suspected of “treasonable or secret machinations against the government.”² No judicial hearing was required. No evidence had to be presented to a court. A targeted person could petition the president under oath to prove he posed no danger and obtain a license to remain, but that meant convincing the same official who ordered him gone.³

The act carried a built-in expiration date of March 3, 1801, and Congress let it lapse.² No one was actually deported under it, though its existence reportedly prompted some French nationals to leave the country on their own.

The Alien Enemies Act

The Alien Enemies Act was different in two important ways. It applied only during a declared war, invasion, or threatened incursion, and it targeted only nationals of a hostile foreign power who were at least fourteen years old.⁴ It had no sunset clause and never expired. It remains federal law today, codified at 50 U.S.C. §§ 21–24.⁵ Its later uses are covered further down.

The Sedition Act

The Sedition Act made it a crime to publish “any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the federal government, either house of Congress, or the president, with intent to defame them or stir up opposition. Conviction carried a fine of up to $2,000 and up to two years in prison. Defendants could argue truth as a defense, and juries were given the right to decide both facts and law.⁶ Those protections proved thin in practice. Every journalist prosecuted under the act edited a Democratic-Republican newspaper. Not a single Federalist publisher was charged.²

Like the Alien Friends Act, the Sedition Act was set to expire on March 3, 1801, the last day of President John Adams’s term. That date was not incidental. Federalists wrote the law to suppress opposition while they held power and to keep it from being turned against them later.

How the Sedition Act Was Used

The Sedition Act was not a symbolic threat. Federal prosecutors used it to jail political opponents and silence critical newspapers.

Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont was the most prominent target. He was charged after publishing writings that ridiculed President Adams as pompous and criticized his handling of foreign affairs. Justice William Paterson sentenced him to four months in prison and a $1,000 fine.⁷ Vermont voters reelected him to Congress while he sat in his jail cell.⁸

Thomas Cooper, a lawyer and newspaper editor in Pennsylvania, was indicted after publishing a broadside sharply critical of Adams. He was tried in Philadelphia in April 1800 and convicted.⁹ James Thomson Callender, a Scottish-born journalist, was convicted in June 1800 after publishing The Prospect Before Us, which attacked Adams personally, and was sentenced to nine months in jail and a $200 fine.

How the Acts Fell

The strongest formal opposition came from two state legislatures. Thomas Jefferson secretly drafted resolutions adopted by the Kentucky General Assembly, while James Madison authored a parallel set adopted by Virginia. Both argued that the federal government was a compact among sovereign states, that Congress had been delegated only specific limited powers, and that the Alien and Sedition Acts exceeded those powers.¹⁰

The Kentucky Resolutions declared that when Congress overstepped its authority, “its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.” A follow-up set in 1799 used the word “nullification” and called it the “rightful remedy.”¹¹ The Virginia Resolutions leaned on the First Amendment, calling the Sedition Act a “palpable and alarming” violation of press freedom and warning that the Alien Friends Act dangerously merged legislative, judicial, and executive power in one branch.¹² No other state legislature formally joined at the time, but the arguments became foundational texts in American debates over federalism and free speech.

The Sedition Act trials turned convicted editors into political martyrs and made the acts a central issue in the 1800 election.² Jefferson defeated Adams, and Democratic-Republicans swept into control of Congress. The Federalist Party never recovered. On taking office, Jefferson pardoned everyone convicted under the Sedition Act and remitted their fines. He later wrote that he considered the law “a nullity, as absolute and as palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image.”¹³ Congress eventually repaid the fines through special legislation, with lawmakers explicitly acknowledging the act had been unconstitutional.

The First Amendment Legacy

The Supreme Court never directly ruled on whether the 1798 Sedition Act violated the First Amendment. But the Court has repeatedly treated its unconstitutionality as settled. In New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), Justice Brennan wrote that “the attack upon its validity has carried the day in the court of history” and described a “broad consensus that the Act, because of the restraint it imposed upon criticism of government and public officials, was inconsistent with the First Amendment.”¹³

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had reached the same conclusion decades earlier. Dissenting in Abrams v. United States (1919), he wrote that “the United States, through many years, had shown its repentance for the Sedition Act of 1798, by repaying fines that it imposed.”¹⁴ Holmes’s dissent, in a case about the separate Sedition Act of 1918, helped lay the groundwork for the modern “clear and present danger” test.

The One Act Still on the Books

While three of the four laws died quickly, the Alien Enemies Act has been invoked during every major war the United States has fought since 1798.

World War I

After the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson issued regulations under the act that restricted German nationals’ conduct. They were barred from owning firearms, required to obtain permits to live or work in restricted zones, and subject to summary arrest if suspected of aiding the enemy. By November 1917, Wilson expanded the rules to require registration. More than 480,000 German nationals were registered, and roughly 6,300 were arrested under presidential warrants.¹⁵

World War II

The act was invoked again after Pearl Harbor, this time against nationals of Japan, Germany, and Italy. The internment of Japanese Americans is the most widely known consequence, though the legal basis for that program involved both the Alien Enemies Act and a separate executive order. Congress formally apologized in 1988, acknowledging the internment was driven by “racial prejudice” and “wartime hysteria” rather than legitimate security concerns. Congress later described the internment of Italian nationals as a “fundamental injustice,” and the Department of Justice recognized that German non-citizens had been targeted “based on their ancestry.”

The 2025 Invocation

In March 2025, President Trump issued Proclamation 10903, invoking the Alien Enemies Act against members of Tren de Aragua (TdA), a Venezuelan criminal organization. The proclamation declared that TdA was “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States” and defined “alien enemies” to include all Venezuelan citizens fourteen and older who are TdA members and not lawfully admitted as permanent residents.¹⁶

This was the first time a president applied the act to members of a criminal organization outside a traditional war. Every previous use had targeted nationals of a foreign government during a declared war or military conflict between nations. Detainees challenged the proclamation in federal court, and the case reached the Supreme Court as Trump v. J.G.G. in April 2025.¹⁷

The Court did not decide whether a criminal gang qualifies as the kind of threat the act was written to address, saying explicitly “we do not reach those arguments.” It did set two procedural requirements. Anyone detained under the act must receive notice that they are subject to removal, and that notice must come with enough time to file a habeas corpus petition in the proper federal court before deportation. The Court also confirmed that detainees are entitled to judicial review of whether they actually qualify as “alien enemies” under the statute.¹⁷ The underlying constitutional questions about the proclamation’s scope remain unresolved.

1
Congress.gov. ArtI.S8.C4.1.2.3 Early U.S. Naturalization Laws
2
National Archives. Alien and Sedition Acts
3
Teaching Legal History. Alien Friends Act (1798)
4
GovInfo. 1 Stat. 577 – An Act Respecting Alien Enemies
5
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 50 USC Ch. 3 – Alien Enemies
6
U.S. Government Publishing Office. 1 U.S. Statutes at Large 596 – An Act in Addition to the Act, Entitled An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes Against the United States
7
Federal Judicial Center. The Sedition Act Trials
8
Office of the Historian. The Life of Representative Matthew Lyon of Vermont and Kentucky
9
National Archives. United States v. Thomas Cooper
10
Founders Online. Thomas Jefferson Papers – Resolutions Adopted by the Kentucky General Assembly
11
The Avalon Project. Kentucky Resolution – Alien and Sedition Acts
12
The Avalon Project. Virginia Resolution – Alien and Sedition Acts
13
Justia. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964)
14
Justia. Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919)
15
National Archives. World War I Enemy Alien Records
16
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 50 USC 21 – Restraint, Regulation, and Removal
17
Supreme Court of the United States. Trump v. J.G.G., No. 24A931 (2025)