Remembering the Injustice of Japanese Internment

On this anniversary of one of America’s darkest domestic policies, we reflect on the forced internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Under the leadership of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the federal government carried out Executive Order 9066, which forcibly relocated over 120,000 individuals of Japanese descent—many of them U.S. citizens—to internment camps for the duration of the war. In an act unthinkable in a nation founded on individual liberty, even those with as little as 1/16th Japanese heritage were deemed a national security threat, uprooted from their lives, and imprisoned based on ancestry alone.

This was not the first time the U.S. government targeted an ethnic group for mass displacement—Native Americans endured forced removals under policies like the Trail of Tears—but it was the first such mass internment of an en