Citing wartime security after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt's order empowered military commanders to designate 'exclusion zones' from which any persons could be removed. In practice it targeted Japanese Americans on the West Coast, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, who were given days to sell homes and businesses before being sent to remote camps in places like Manzanar and Tule Lake. No comparable order targeted German or Italian Americans at scale.
Executive Order 9066 was issued ten weeks after Pearl Harbor amid a climate of panic, racial prejudice, and unsubstantiated fears of sabotage along the Pacific coast. It did not name any ethnic group directly, but the military zones it authorized were drawn to sweep up virtually the entire Japanese American population of California, Oregon, Washington, and parts of Arizona.
Families had, in some cases, only 48 hours to dispose of farms, shops, and possessions accumulated over decades, often selling everything at a fraction of its value to opportunistic buyers. They were then transported to one of ten hastily built 'relocation centers' surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, where many remained for up to three years in tar-paper barracks in desert or swampland locations.
The Supreme Court upheld the policy in Korematsu v. United States in 1944, a decision that stood as legal precedent for decades even as historians and jurists increasingly condemned it. In 1988, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, formally apologizing and paying reparations of $20,000 to each surviving internee. The camps remain one of the starkest instances of the U.S. government stripping its own citizens of rights on the basis of ancestry alone.
Key people: Franklin D. Roosevelt