On August 10, 1988, after initially opposing the legislation, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, the language of which declares that the incarcerations of Japanese Americans were “carried out without adequate security reasons and without any acts of espionage or sabotage, and were motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” It still took three to five years for most of the 82,219 people then eligible to receive redress checks of twenty thousand dollars each.
