Question

Could could the government ever justified relocating an entire ethnic group why or why not

Answer 1

In early WWII, about 50,000 Japanese citizens living near the American west coast and their 70,000 American born descendants, virtually all children and young adults, were forcibly removed from the area, most of them to internment or relocation camps.  The vast majority of these incarcerated people had no reason to be deemed guilty, or even suspicious, beyond their ethnicity.  Most were ultimately deemed "loyal" and many thousands allowed to leave to live away from the west coast during the war.  It took several years for the US supreme court to order the whole group released, though they were set free before the war ended.  Many, especially the old (most of the Japanese citizens were quite old), having lost nearly everything in the disruption and fearing war hostility outside, remained in the camps voluntarily until after the end of the war.   The internment has become one of the most widely condemned actions in US history.

This site is not hostile to Japanese Americans and in fact expresses admiration at how they came through the ordeal.  It says that there were considerable military justifications for the internment, though it does not go so far as to conclude that these justifications were sufficient.  It disagrees with most other sources not so much in the facts and details, but in its reasoning that there was any justification for the internment at all.

You can read most sites on the internment, and you will learn about myriad ways in which the ethnic Japanese interned during most of WWII suffered.  Maybe if you're lucky you'll learn the names of the camps and a few dates.  From a point of view of avoiding having this sort of disaster happen again to anybody, you will have accomplished nothing.   You can only contribute intelligently to this whole issue if you learn about how the decision to intern was made, and the perspective from which it was made, and the apparent motivations.   That is the issue addressed by this site.