More than 120,000 American Japanese were forced from their homes and incarcerated in ten “relocation centers” and several prison
s during World War II. Within months of the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent them to these “concentration camps” by executive order. Most of the evacuees and prisoners, more than 70 percent of them, were American citizens, born in the United States. Their first-generation immigrant parents, however, were forever aliens, prevented from gaining naturalized citizenship by the Immigration Act of 1924. Most of them, citizens and aliens alike, were fiercely patriotic. Guarded by soldiers in machine-gun towers, none of them were charged with any crime against the United States. In fact, there was not a single American of Japanese descent, alien or citizen, charged with espionage or sabotage during the war. These men, women and children were locked up for the duration of the war because they looked like the enemy, the troops of Imperial Japan, a place most of them had never seen.
...The dangers of history repeating itself seem greater given that this story is often forgotten, or treated as a footnote in the larger, mostly heroic description of World War II found in American history textbooks. Even at the time, the American Japanese concentration camps were underreported or misrepresented. Although there were periodic national stories about the roundup and incarceration of the American Japanese, much of that coverage treated the evacuation as something like a vacation trip to the country. The camps were generally portrayed as resorts, “pioneer communities” was the euphemism of the day. Americans, their sons shipping off to Europe and the Pacific, had a lot on their minds in those days--and California was still far away from most of America.
Based on this document, what is one way the US Government restricted the civil liberties of Japanese Americans during World War II?
