Asian Pacific American Law Journal

Immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) of 1798, leading to the arrest of thousands of West Coast Issei men and their wartime detention in Army and INS facilities in an internment process that was distinct from the incarceration of nearly 127,000 persons of Japanese ancestry under Executive Order 9066. In the spring of 2025, President Donald J. Trump invoked this act against alleged Tren de Aragua members on the basis that this Venezuelan gang has “invaded” the United States, spawning a blizzard of litigation over this Trump administration’s assertion of authority in immigration policy and practices.

This panel, which took place on October 9, 2025, discussed how this act was applied to and impacted the Japanese American wartime community, ramifications of the current administration’s approaches, the status of the court cases challenging the administration’s use of the AEA, and the amicus brief that was filed on behalf of descendants of Issei men who were imprisoned when the AEA was invoked in World War II. The speakers also discussed how to accurately and effectively speak about the lessons from history when communities, especially those of color, live under the specter and reality of arrest, detention, and deportation.

As the first of its kind, this Article centers survivor testimony, archival records, and original interviews to document the forced deportation of Japanese Americans on the SS Gripsholm during World War II. The event is often described as a wartime “exchange,” but that language obscures what the record reveals: a governmental regime that transformed Japanese ancestry into a marker of presumptive disloyalty; and then leveraged confinement, vulnerability, and the fear of continued state violence to compel Japanese Americans’ removal from the United

States. This was not neutral repatriation. This was state-engineered exile under conditions that rendered consent impossible. Focusing on the experiences of the Miyamoto, Rikimaru, and Yamane families, this Article shows the Gripsholm was the final stage of a broader racialized project of surveillance, arrest, incarceration then interrogation, family separation, and finally the forced abandonment of lives painstakingly built in the United States. It further demonstrates that the Gripsholm “Exchanges” formed a critical node in the larger architecture of anti-Asian racial exclusion, where law and administration converted wartime hysteria and racial prejudice into forced deportation and profound displacement.

This Article further argues that the Gripsholm survivors’ Redress Campaign is central to understanding the historical and legal significance of the Gripsholm episode. Initially, the Gripsholm families were denied redress. Yet the survivors persisted, documenting what happened to them, challenging the official account, and ultimately winning inclusion in redress. Their campaign exposed the falsity of the official record and the danger of institutional harm being covered up as neutrality, and coercion as consent. The survivors’ victory also proves that legal recognition and reparative justice do not arrive on their own. They are fought for by ordinary people who choose courage over cynicism. In recovering this history, this Article participates in a broader movement wherein Japanese Americans and other marginalized communities push back against racist revisionism that silences our voices and monopolizes formal scholarship on our own lived experiences, reclaiming narrative authority over our own histories. We did not want to go.

Asian Americans experience workplace discrimination at disproportionately high rates yet file formal employment discrimination claims at strikingly low levels. This disconnect reflects not only cultural and structural barriers to reporting, but also doctrinal limitations within Title VII jurisprudence that fail to capture the lived realities of Asian American professionals. This Note examines how courts’ reliance on the McDonnell Douglas burden-shifting framework—particularly its comparator requirement in disparate treatment claims—systematically disadvantages Asian American plaintiffs whose experiences of discrimination often do not fit traditional comparative models.

By situating contemporary employment discrimination doctrine within the social and cultural context of Asian American workplace experiences, this Note argues that strict adherence to comparator-based proof creates an unjust evidentiary barrier that forecloses meaningful legal redress. It contends that the McDonnell Douglas framework should not function as a rigid prima facie standard and instead advocates for broader adoption of the “mosaic approach,” which permits courts to assess the full constellation of circumstantial evidence surrounding discriminatory conduct. Through doctrinal analysis, social context, and case-study application, this Note proposes a reorientation of Title VII analysis that better aligns with the statute’s purpose of ensuring equal employment opportunity and provides more effective protection for Asian American workers.

Asian Americans historically have been underrepresented in the estate planning community, partially due to the decision of Asian Americans to forgo will execution. This Article focuses specifically on the estate planning experiences of East Asian Americans, mainly from South Korea, Japan, and China. This Article begins by examining some of the reasons which motivate East Asian Americans to forgo estate planning, including the cultural sensitivities that may not be accounted for by the current composition of estate planning attorneys, in which East Asian Americans are underrepresented. Next, this Article examines case law to demonstrate that East Asian Americans have had their estate planning documents challenged, mainly through accusations that due execution was not achieved because the documents were written in a different language than spoken by the testator or party to the agreement (if not a will). Subsequently, this Article briefly addresses some of the differences which exist in the probate systems between East Asian countries and the United States to demonstrate that such discrepancies may create confusion and frustration for recent East Asian immigrants looking to create testamentary documents in the United States. This Article then transitions by glimpsing ahead at efforts to remedy both the lack of inclusion and the challenging situations that have been faced by East Asian Americans in the estate planning community, mainly by observing recent efforts to engage and educate East Asian Americans on the importance of estate planning. Finally, this Article provides solutions to reduce the likelihood of will contests for East Asian Americans, as well as solutions for improving the experiences of East Asian Americans in will execution overall, considering the international differences and cultural sensitivities that impact East Asian American testators.