Every Monday afternoon, Columbia University faculty and researchers hold a one-hour silent vigil for students who have been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Among the students who have been honored in the vigil are former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, who was detained by ICE for 102 days, and non-Columbia affiliated students such as New York City high school student Dylan Lopez Contreras.
Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, many universities like Columbia have been forced to confront whether and how they can protect their students from deportation and detainment, a task these institutions have not faced for decades. In such unprecedented times, universities may look to the future for their solutions, perhaps even waiting in anticipation for the next presidential administration.
But perhaps, in determining their next steps, they should instead take a look to the past. The solution to the struggles of international students today might be found more than 80 years ago in the story of Kentaro Ikeda.
Then: The Case of Kentaro Ikeda
In the late 1930s, Kentaro Ikeda immigrated from Kanazawa, Japan to the United States. After arriving in the country, he briefly attended Poly Prep in Brooklyn before enrolling in Lawrenceville School in New Jersey in 1938. Known for his cheery demeanor, Ikeda became a popular, high-achieving student at Princeton University.
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Little did he know that he would spend most of his college years unable to leave campus.
In February of 1942, two months after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt initiated Executive Order 9066, which split the West Coast into military zones and gave legal authority for military commanders to exclude civilians, especially those of Japanese heritage, from military-controlled areas. Quickly, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt created curfews and ultimately imposed evacuation and detention orders on Japanese Americans. One hundred twelve thousand Japanese Americans, 70,000 of whom were American citizens, were held in internment camps. Many of those detained did not retaliate in order to avoid spending a year in prison and paying a $5,000 fine.
If Ikeda returned to Japan, he would be seen as an American traitor. If he stayed in the United States, he would constantly run the risk of deportation or internment, with his now-frozen Japanese assets useless to him. At the same time that he was rushing the Key and Seal eating club like any other Princeton University student, Ikeda had to worry about his right to study in the U.S. at all. Ikeda’s classmates at Princeton University began calling him demeaning names such as “Spy,” “K-42,” and “Fifth Column,” all inferring that he was a traitor to the U.S. At the time, the Trenton Evening Times described these interactions as “friendly proddings.”
The State Department swiftly demanded that Ikeda report to Ellis Island for deportation as an “enemy alien.” But Ikeda found a solution at Princeton. In order to avoid deportation, he worked with Princeton to become an “alien enemy parolee,” requiring him to remain on campus at all times. Assistant Dean Burnham Dell became Ikeda’s sponsor and was required to meet with Ikeda once a week. Dell was also required to track Ikeda’s every action and write monthly reports for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Ikeda was unable to execute functions as simple as leaving town or accessing funds without Dell’s permission.
After Ikeda completed Princeton’s accelerated Program, he began teaching Japanese at Yale University to soldiers, where his sponsorship was taken over by professor Franklin Edgerton. After the war ended, Ikeda still had to navigate difficult immigration rights. He did not have a legal basis to stay in the United States, and under the Immigration Act of 1924, Japanese nationals were unable to immigrate to the U.S. Ikeda’s friends and former colleagues from Princeton and Lawrenceville School worked with Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut to grant Ikeda an extended visa, but it was not until 1952 that the McCarran-Walter Act would legalize immigration from Japan to the U.S.
Although the internment of Japanese residents was carried out through Executive Order 9066, the foundation for Roosevelt’s order was the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, created by the eighteenth-century Federalist Party to forbid entry and restrict the rights of purportedly disloyal immigrants. The U.S. has only employed the Alien Enemies Act four times since its inception: the War of 1812, World War I, this instance in World War II, and in March of 2025 under President Donald Trump..
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Now: The Struggles of Immigrant Students Today
On Mar. 15, 2025, President Trump released a proclamation entitled “Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of The United States by Tren De Aragua.” In Section 3 of the proclamation, President Trump ordered that all Alien Enemies related to Tren de Aragua “are subject to immediate apprehension, detention, and removal.” He specifically named Tren de Aragua, a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” from Venezuela, as the target of the proclamation. Shortly after Trump’s proclamation, 137 out of 261 alleged gang members were sent to El Salvador. Among these alleged members was Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man from Maryland who was later found to have been mistakenly deported.
Many Venezuelan nationals who were living in the U.S. were targeted by ICE because they had supposed “gang-affiliated tattoos.” In many of these cases, these tattoos actually displayed their children’s names or messages of hope. In fact, there is no known association between tattoos and membership in TDA. More likely, the initiation of this act is merely an excuse to revitalize racist stereotypes and generalize broad groups of people for deportation. Regardless, these actions by the federal government contribute to the foundation of fear that international students live in today.
In May, the Supreme Court blocked President Trump from continuing the Alien Enemies Act deportations, but legal battles on the lower court level persist. Given the continual battle fought by immigrants and their advocates against the Trump administration today, any viable lesson from the largely successful resistance story of Ikeda is one worth considering.
Yet much has changed since the 1940s. In the current climate, could a university sponsor and protect a student facing deportation as an “alien enemy” under the Alien Enemies Act or other immigration mandates? If recent actions by the Trump administration are any indication, then the answer is likely a resounding “no.” Given the recent erosion of the legal system under President Trump, the protections that worked for Kentaro Ikeda more than 80 years ago would likely prove futile today.
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While the Alien Enemies Act may not be the legal foundation for all of the deportations being executed, proclamations like AEA underscore the broader collapse of due process for immigrants in the U.S. In the 1940s, some of the detainees in Japanese internment camps, such as Mistuye Endo, filed habeas corpus petitions, challenging their imprisonment in court. In May, those from President Trump’s administration called habeas corpus a privilege. On July 3, the Supreme Court suspended an April 18 order that had blocked the government from deporting non-citizens to “third countries without notice or a meaningful opportunity to be heard.” The dissenting opinion by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson explains that the United States “may not deport noncitizens to a country where they are likely to be tortured or killed,” but their position was in the minority. The degradation of due process has become all too real.
Just as Kentaro Ikeda had to risk his livelihood to remain on Princeton’s campus, many students now live in fear of facing the same classification of Alien Enemy. Students today, however, do not even enjoy many of the due process protections that Ikeda was able to access.
Students like Chipantiza-Sisalema, a 20-year-old high school student, are being forced to stay in detention centers. Chipantiza-Sisalema was not given the opportunity to call a lawyer.
19-year-old high school student Derlis Snaider Chusin Toaquiza was fed less than two meals a day, forced to sleep sitting up, and confined in a small room with more than 60 people. As due process falls by the wayside, these stories of vulnerability become less and less difficult to find.
Then and Now: What is the Path Forward for Immigrant Students?
In Korematsu v. U.S., 23 year old Fred Korematsu worked with the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge the constitutionality of Japanese internment camps, but the Supreme Court ultimately stated that his detention was a “military necessity”. The dissenting opinion, unrecognized for its wisdom until decades later, stated that the government’s mass exclusion order was “the legalization of racism.”
In 1983, more than 40 years after Kentaro Ikeda was first detained on Princeton’s campus, Korematsu was reopened after a legal team filed a “coram nobis” petition. The team found that the federal government’s attorneys in Korematsu had manipulated and removed evidence that Japanese Americans posed no military threat to the United States. In 1987, Congress formally deemed the use of the Alien Enemies Act during World War II a “fundamental injustice.”
Will it take another forty years for the federal government to reevaluate the immigration mandates of this year? What damage can be done until then? If the appalling decisions of the 1940s were made with due process — at least to some extent — how much worse will the decisions of today seem in our national memory decades from now?
Kentaro Ikeda used mechanisms that should be at the disposal of all Americans to appeal to friends, representatives, and federal government agencies so that he could continue to live in America. Many of these mechanisms seem to be failing 80 years later; however, work is underway to secure court decisions that maintain these due process rights. Advocates on behalf of immigrants are filing class action lawsuits to stop mass immigration court arrests by ICE and block “fast-track” deportations by the federal government. Harvard, in the same spirit as Princeton in its support of Kentaro Ikeda, is currently challenging a federal ban on its ability to enroll international students.
Institutions and American citizens with the power to change the status quo must continue to strive for due process and a reasonable pathway to citizenship for American immigrants, especially as immigrant students’ voices and pursuits make our country better every day. Ikeda’s solution of the 1940s might remain in the history books, but as long as hope and conviction for a just system holds steadfast, the stories of international students today can culminate in a resolution just as worthy of our tireless efforts.
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