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From Colorlines:

This Sunday marks the 70th anniversary of President Franklin Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066, which led to the forced internment of more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans who lived along the West Coast. The order came after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In the wake of the attack, Japanese-Americans were immediately cast as a threat too dangerous to be allowed to live freely.

The U.S., citing national security interests, demanded that Japanese-Americans be interned without due process or, it would eventually turn out, any factual basis. Whole communities were rounded up and sent to camps, sometimes just clapboard shelters or converted horse stables, in arid deserts and barren fields in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Arkansas. Any state away from the coast where Japanese-Americans could theoretically consort with others who might again harm the U.S. Families were forced to abandon their businesses, communities, property and homes. Some families were separated and interned separately. Some were given just 48 hours to pack up and leave their homes. The majority—more than two thirds—of those interned were U.S.-born citizens.

Later, it would be revealed that the U.S. government held no evidence that any Japanese-American engaged in espionage, and a congressionally appointed commission eventually found, instead, that the four-year internment was “motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

For many, the country’s post-9/11 treatment of American Muslims, Arabs, South Asians and people of Middle Eastern descent carries near identical echoes of the not so distant past. Many Japanese-Americans have spoken out about the increased surveillance and indefinite detention that Muslim and Arab communities face today.

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