Justice Department lied to the Supreme Court so Japanese-Americans could be shipped to internment camps

It is the same old story from Big Brother Government:  "We need to do this for national security."   But it was a lie.  Racial hatred long pre-dated Pearl Harbor.  The war was used as an excuse to confiscate private property.

So Americans of Japanese heritage were rounded up.  But why was the Army not sent into New York's Little Italy to round up those "dangerous" Italians who might help Mussolini?  What about the German immigrants?  The Axis Powers had many willing allies such as Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Spain.  Where were the Concentration Camps for those groups?

To me it came down to race.  No more, no less.

The New York Times, February 17, 1935

Anti-Asian Laws were Nothing New

On October 11, 1906, the San Francisco, California Board of Education had passed a regulation children of Japanese descent would be required to attend racially segregated separate schools.

The California Alien Land Law of 1913 prohibited "aliens ineligible for citizenship" (all Asian immigrants) from owning land or property, but permitted three-year leases. It affected the Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Korean immigrant farmers in California. It passed thirty-five to two in the Senate and seventy-two to three in the Assembly and was co-written by attorney Francis J. Heney and California state attorney general Ulysses S. Webb at the behest of Progressive Republican Governor Hiram Johnson.   Japan's Consul General Kametaro Iijima and lawyer Juichi Soyeda lobbied against the law.  The law was invalidated in 1952 by the Supreme Court of California as a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Douglas Daily Dispatch, September 4, 1934

The state of California passed a new Alien Land Law of 1920 that made the restrictions of the 1913 law even more stringent. Up to that time, many Asian immigrants had circumvented California’s land law by purchasing agricultural land in the names of their American-born children and made themselves the managers of the land.


California’s 1920 law was designed to make it even harder for Asians to own land. It required all persons purchasing land in someone else’s name to prove they were not doing so to circumvent the terms of the 1913 law. The 1920 law also prohibited naming as trustees persons ineligible for citizenship and effectively reversed the traditional burden of proof, requiring people to prove themselves innocent.

Ten other American states passed restrictive land-ownership laws during the decade 1913–23.  States that added or modified such laws and provisions during the 1920’s included Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington. During World War II, anti-Japanese fervor caused Arkansas, Utah, and Wyoming to enact such laws. Most of these states’ laws remained in effect until at least the 1950’s.

Justice Department Lies to the Supreme Court

The US Justice Department said last week that "mistakes" were made in its legal defense of the forced relocation and internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii by the Imperial Japanese Navy, the United States forcibly displaced over 110,000 people of Japanese descent and held them at internment camps during the war. Most were US citizens.

Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said that his predecessor many years ago ignored a US Naval Intelligence report that found that only a small portion of Japanese Americans may pose a threat.

"Instead, he argued that it was impossible to segregate loyal Japanese Americans from disloyal ones... And to make matters worse, he relied on gross generalizations about Japanese Americans, such as that they were disloyal and motivated by 'racial solidarity,'" added Katyal.

Then-Solicitor General Fahy defended the “military necessity” of an executive order by FDR that cleared the way for the government to relocate Japanese Americans to internment camps. Katyal acknowledged that had it not been for Fahy’s suppression of key evidence, the Supreme Court may have well ruled differently in the landmark cases brought to them by Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu, where the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans was deemed constitutional.


Americans being loaded into railroad cars and shipped
to Government Concentration camps.  It not only can
happen here, it did happen here.

 The decisions are two of only a few cases where the high court ruled that the government met standards of strict scrutiny for racial discrimination, and are widely viewed as some of the worst decisions in Supreme Court history. The rulings were overturned in the 1980s after political scientist and civil rights lawyer Peter Irons unearthed the government files that proved that the U.S. military did not, in fact, see Japanese Americans as a threat in 1942.  Judge Marilyn Patel noted that critical evidence had been “knowingly concealed from the courts”.

Japanese Americans Reaction

"For me, it confirms what we knew back in the 1940s," said Kerry Yo Nakagawa of Fresno, whose grandparents and parents were interned in Jerome, Ark.

"It's so unbelievable that just a handful of people could do that by suppressing the truth."

The admission also "was not surprising" to Marsha Auchard of Fresno, whose mother was interned at the Gila River camp near Phoenix. "But it's sad because [the internment] didn't have to happen."

Big Brother Concentration Camps, confiscation of
private property and racial identity cards.  The only
thing missing was a final solution plan.

Nakagawa's grandparents lost a restaurant and general store they ran in Fresno's Chinatown. When his grandfather returned to Fresno, the lease on his store had changed hands. Also, his grandmother had died while they were interned in Arkansas.

"They got their civil liberties and homes and businesses taken away. Once they came back, they couldn't start over," Nakagawa said. "A lot of people [at the time] said it was a land grab."

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