Japanese Internment Research Paper

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February 19, 1942. About two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which allowed for the legal internment of Americans with Japanese ancestry living on the west coast. FDR and the U.S. Army claimed it was out of military necessity and to defend California, Oregon, and Washington from another Japanese attack. There were no exceptions. Lawyers, doctors, business people, and even wounded Japanese American war veterans were sent to internment camps (Marrin 97-98). By the end of the roundup, over 120,000 Japanese-Americans were sent away from their homes and communities, and were not released until after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan marking the end of the …show more content…

The internment of Japanese Americans broke many of the sacred laws and statutes set up by the Constitution which were set in place to ensure that a tyrannical government with absolute power would never take hold again. Article 1, Section 9, Clause 2 stated that the government may not suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus except in cases of rebellion or endangerment of public safety. The government claimed that any person of Japanese descent could have ties to Imperial Japan as spies or saboteurs but intelligence reports from this time period indicated that only three percent of the Japanese Americans still harbored loyalties to Japan (Frail 93). If the government would have acted based on the Navy and FBI reports then they would have found that there was no reason to suspend Habeas Corpus, and they would have tried treasonous Japanese-Americans according to the procedure laid out by the Constitution. Article 1, Section 9, Clause 3 states that no bills of attainder or ex post facto laws shall be passed by Congress. A bill of attainder was defined as any act of legislature that was aimed at punishing a people group for a crime without a trail. Executive Order 9066 and Public Law 503, which gave the army the power to enforce relocation policies, were bills of attainder targeting a specific group of people therefore they were unconstitutional (Japanese