Could American Internment Camps Return?

Seventy-two years ago today, FDR signed an order that ultimately forced more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans to shutter their businesses and abandon their homes. Civil libertarians are observing the anniversary alongside Japanese-American communities across the country:

The Day of Remembrance marks not only the day in 1942 when President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order allowing the internment of 120,000 people of Japanese origin after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor; it also serves as “a reminder to our communities – our civil rights are still not protected,” said Karen Korematsu, whose father, Fred Korematsu, famously challenged his detention in the landmark Supreme Court case Korematsu v. United States in 1944. Karen Korematsu cited the NDAA’s indefinite detentions as one attack on civil rights now faced primarily by American Muslims. Among the other issues they say they face are the mass infiltration of mosque communities by law enforcement and harassment by Transportation Security Administration staff at US borders.

Carl Takei shares some family history:

During the war, my grandfather served in a racially segregated US Army artillery unit. Scouts from his battalion were among those who liberated survivors of the Nazi death camp at Dachau. But while my grandfather fought in Europe, my grandmother waited for him in an American concentration camp. With these stories, I grew up with a visceral sense not only of the fragility of our constitutional rights, but also how profound a deprivation of liberty it is to be taken from one’s home and encircled by guards and barbed wire. That awareness is a significant part of why I chose to fight for the rights of prisoners, immigration detainees, and other people deprived of their liberty in the United States.

(Photo: A young evacuee in California waits with family baggage before leaving for assembly center in the spring of 1942. By the Department of the Interior/War Relocation Authority)