Like steer, they were sent by train to relocation centers and camps located in the most undesirable and remote regions in the country-the deserts and swamplands of California, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas. About 80,000 of these people were US citizens and held indefinitely, in the absence of a single case of espionage on the West Coast during World War II or any declaration of martial law.
Roosevelt’s executive orders, the US government considered approximately 120,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry to be disloyal. These orders were egregious examples of how laws can be used as an instrument of racism and how racist laws can be defended by claims that such laws are not race-based. ,, As history revealed, the curfew and exclusion orders enforced against the Japanese were based on racial prejudice, unsupported by evidence of any real Japanese threat. Without question, the Japanese American internment experience is relevant to the post-9/11 war on terror and President Donald J. This article compares the wartime Supreme Court’s complete deferral to the government’s justification for the detention of Japanese Americans to argue that the modern Supreme Court repeated a similar tragic mistake almost seventy-five years later in Trump v. This piece was published in the 31st print volume of the Asian American Policy Review.
