Existing comment:
Citizens or Enemies?
"I'm for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska and Hawaii now and putting them in concentration camps."
-- Congressman John Rankin (Mississippi), 1942
In February 1942, two months after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed an executive order permitting the government to take "every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage."
Citing national security concerns, the US government used that order to relocate more than 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry -- at least two-thirds of whom were American citizens -- to ten camps across seven inland states. Thousands of people of German and Italian descent also were detained and questioned as a result of the executive order.
Japanese Americans challenged curfew, evacuation, and detention restrictions in US courts at least 12 times during the war. Four cases reached the US Supreme Court. In each case, the court concluded that the war powers of Congress and the president justified forcibly detaining American citizens in camps. |