Under Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, approximately 120,000 people of Japanese descent — two-thirds of them US citizens — were forcibly removed from the West Coast and incarcerated in concentration camps including Manzanar, Tule Lake, and Heart Mountain. The Supreme Court upheld the policy in Korematsu v. United States (1944). The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 provided formal apologies and $20,000 reparations payments to surviving incarcerees; Korematsu was repudiated (in dicta) by the Court in Trump v. Hawaii (2018).

Why it’s been targeted

In June 2022, the Muskego-Norway School Board (WI) refused to approve a sociology unit on Japanese American incarceration, with board members demanding “the perspective of the American government and why Japanese internment happened” and suggesting Pearl Harbor materials to provide “balance.” Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar has been challenged or removed in Texas (Krause list), Florida, and Virginia (Spotsylvania) per PEN America. Texas SB 3 (2021) limits framing in which historical state action constitutes wrongdoing.