On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a bulletin headed “Alien Registration Requirement” that sounds less like America than some benighted nation where teens can be stopped in the street with the request: “Papers, please.”
The missive cited Section 262 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which “clearly says that all aliens must be registered and fingerprinted within 30 days of their 14th birthday,” according to the bulletin.
It adds, “Failure to comply will result in criminal and civil penalties, up to and including misdemeanor prosecution and the payment of fines.”
That means the teen will have committed a crime. And in the Trumpian view, anybody who commits crime is a criminal—with exceptions for President Trump himself and the Jan. 6 rioters.
Any “alien child” under 14 should have already been registered by their parents—but even that won’t save them.
“Previously registered alien children must apply to re-register and to be fingerprinted,” the bulletin says.
Any parents who have failed to register an alien child are also guilty of a crime.
“It shall be the duty of every parent or legal guardian of any alien now or hereafter in the United States, who is less than fourteen years of age … to apply for the registration” within a month of arrival in the United States,” the applicable law says.
That applies even to children who have already been registered by their parents.
Once an alien child has been registered and fingerprinted, DHS will issue him or her a document it calls “evidence of registration.”
“Aliens over the age of 18 must carry and keep [it] in their possession at all times,” the bulletin says.
The requirement in fact dates back to the Alien Registration Act of 1940. That was on the eve of America’s involvement in World War II, but it did not only apply to those from Germany and Japan. The act says, “It shall be the duty of every alien now or hereafter in the United States who is fourteen years of age or older [and] has not been registered and fingerprinted to do so within 30 days of arriving in the United States.”
In the first four months, 4,741,971 people registered. The total reached 5.6 million by 1944.
Only around 500 people were arrested for failing to register. One was Paul Mazola, a 26-year-old laborer from Van Nuys, California. He sought to enlist under the name Pauli Farell at an army recruiting station during the second week of December, 1941, in the immediate aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Whether they were prompted by the unusual spelling of his supposed given name or by something else, police questioned him. He owned up to his actual identity and told them he had come to America from Italy—a Nazi ally—when he was 1 year old. The Van Nuys News reported, “Police Question Alien Laborer.”
Eighty-four years later, Trump has revived a law that had become all but forgotten. His administration said in a statement on Wednesday, “An alien’s failure to register is a crime that could result in a fine, imprisonment, or both. For decades, this law has been ignored — not anymore.”
Nobody should be surprised. In the first hours of his second term, Trump issued an executive order titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” In accordance with that order, DHS has pledged to round up huge numbers of what it considers “criminal aliens.”
But that has proven more difficult than anticipated. So, the newly ensconced federal authorities have set out to make more criminals.
The Daily Beast asked DHS on Wednesday if ICE will be able to simply go up to suspected teen “aliens” and say, “Papers, please.”
DHS did not respond, but it is on record saying that it is ready to make criminals out of aliens barely in their teens who fail to register within 30 days of their 14th birthday.
