When the Trump administration sent three planeloads of alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador earlier this month, 137 of the 261 passengers were being removed pursuant to the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. That ran into a legal buzz-saw with U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg, on grounds that due process had not been afforded the deportees. He ordered flights not to take-off, and, once they did anyway, to return to the U.S.

The 1798 act was signed into law by President John Adams along with three other bills. They were known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts and were enacted by the Adams’s Federalist Party Congress in response to mounting belligerent acts by the French against U.S. ships. War fever was running high in the country over fears that revolutionary France, then at war with Great Britain, would escalate the quasi-war into a full-scale national war with America.

Although Adams had not requested the alien and sedition acts, he signed them into law to appease his frothing Federalist colleagues in Congress. The sedition acts were employed frequently to imprison or fine persons who criticized the U.S. government or its officials.

Adams did not have occasion to trigger the alien enemies measure that would have allowed him, during wartime, to........

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