ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines US World War II policies related to Japanese Americans’ human rights and civil rights violations including their forced removal from California, Washington, Oregon, and Arizona; incarceration in War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps and limited options for leaving the camps during the war. The majority of Japanese Americans forced from the West Coast by President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 remained imprisoned throughout the war, but the WRA dispersed a third of the population into the Midwest and East Coast via indefinite leave. By the morning of December 9, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had arrested 1,212 Japanese men whom FBI officials considered potential threats to US national security. On August 7, 1942, Lieutenant General DeWitt announced that he had removed 110,000 Japanese Americans from their West Coast homes and that these individuals were either in the “assembly centers” or in the WRA concentration camps.
