By SUZANNE DOWNING
On Feb. 19, 1942, Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forced removal and internment of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans and others living on the West Coast.
Roosevelt, serving as commander in chief during World War II, issued the order two-and-a-half month after Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 7, 1941. By February, the United States was fully at war with Japan. Fear of invasion, sabotage, and espionage dominated public discourse. The internment policy was broadly defended as a military necessity.
Today, the order is widely regarded as one of the worst violations of civil liberties in American history, a case of racial profiling and collective punishment carried out under the banner of national security.
While most Americans associate internment with California, Oregon, and Washington, Alaska, still a territory, felt the impact in a unique and immediate way.
By June 1942, Japanese forces had invaded and occupied the Aleutian Islands of Attu and Kiska, Â the only enemy occupation of American soil during World War II. The invasion intensified fears throughout the territory.
In response, federal authorities removed hundreds of Alaska Natives, primarily Aleut residents — from their homes in the Aleutians. Entire villages were evacuated. Many were transported to Southeast Alaska and housed in abandoned canneries and other makeshift facilities. Conditions were not five star, to say the least, but it was an attempt to prevent their deaths.
Unlike Japanese Americans in the Lower 48, the Alaska Native evacuees were not suspected of espionage. Â Also, Japanese Americans living in Alaska were rounded up and sent to internment camps in the Lower 48.
There are only a few hundred survivors still alive who went through that experience, and they would have been very young children or babies during the internment 84 years ago.
In 1988, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, formally apologizing for the internment of Japanese Americans and providing financial compensation to surviving detainees. The act acknowledged that the policy was driven by “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Reparations of $20,000 per person were made by the act, with about 80,000 people still alive to receive those payments and the apology in 1988.
Eighty-four years after Executive Order 9066, Democrats are objecting to illegal aliens being rounded up and sent back to their homelands. But when their party had power, they rounded up and imprisoned actual Americans.
5 thoughts on “That time when the Democrat president rounded up Americans and forced them into internment camps”
I don’t get to a link with today’s enforcement of the immigration laws against those that have illegally entered the country.
The unlawful interment of Japanese-Americans is the most shameful action by a President in the twentieth century. Despite never-ending fawning coverage by most media and academics, Mr. Roosevelt was an elitist Eastern snob with limited affection or knowledge of those outside his social circles. Throughout my education, I sat side-by-side with Japanese Americans and benefitted greatly from that experience. My father was on the receiving end of Japanese bombs and bullets. Eventually, the Roosevelt administration realized their error and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team became the most highly decorated unit in the European theater. Roosevelt’s failure to understand the difference between a nation and a people demonstrates stupidity.
As for the linkage to today’s enforcement of the immigration laws, the Left is now strangely silent as to “the rule of law”. Remember that never-ending phrase?
The thing I took away from reading that experience by Japanese Americans or Jewish people was that Native Americans can learn how to put the past behind them, how to totally surrender and forgiveness, how to focus on the living and pick up where they left off, and raise happy and blessed children. If Native Americans could stand outside themselves instead of internally replaying the hurt and injustice over n over again even telling people the hurt that they put their very own children (today’s children) behind the very prison bars their grandparents lived behind passing on the hatred, fears, depression, anger, on to their children.
Anyway. Japanese and Jewish Americans are a culture group we can admire in their ability to had endured injustice and hardship that today’s Jewish and Japanese American descendants are living successful and prosperous lives because their parents and grandparents chose not to dwell on the past but to live in the present and survivors picking up where their life left off.
Geez Tina, where do you come up with this stuff. It’s nutty in its naivete.
Sounds kinda something, like that Democrat slur “Fascist!!!” And FDR is a hero to their party could it be that they’d like to herd anyone opposing them into camps,like their hero did. Scratch a,lefitst, and a totalitarian bleeds.
Democrats say: “Next time, we’ll keep ’em in the camps for life — and make them wear masks, too!”