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Abstract

This article traces the historical evolution of U.S. presidential emergency powers, examining how successive administrations have exploited national crises to consolidate executive authority and target perceived “enemies within” by criminalizing immigration, suppressing dissent, and suspending constitutional rights and liberties — including due process — in the name of national security. It begins by defining key concepts — constitutional dictatorship, states of exception, imperial presidency, and unitary executive theory — and situates these concepts within long-standing critiques of the U.S. Constitution’s flawed, anti-democratic design. The analysis surveys historical episodes, including John Adams’s 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson’s World War I-era repression and First Red Scare ideological crackdowns, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and Harry Truman’s early Cold War and Second Red Scare loyalty purges. It further examines the Post-9/11 expansion of executive power under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The article then turns to the second Trump administration’s unprecedented peacetime invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to justify mass deportations — including the removal of lawful permanent residents and U.S. citizens — alongside the militarization of the U.S.–Mexico border, the expansion of domestic law enforcement’s scope and capacity, and the suppression of academic freedom and campus speech. The article concludes that the normalization of peacetime emergency powers advances a maximalist and unchecked unitary executive, posing an existential threat to both the constitutional separation of powers and the durability of constitutional rights and liberties in the United States.

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