One order, naming no one directly, sends 120,000 American citizens' neighbors to the desert
What happened
Ten weeks after Pearl Harbor, on 19 February 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing military commanders to exclude any or all persons from designated military areas. The order named no ethnic group, but over the following months it was used to forcibly remove about 122,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast into ten permanent camps in remote inland locations, including Manzanar in California, Topaz in Utah, and Heart Mountain in Wyoming. Nearly 70,000 of those confined were United States citizens by birth; the government brought no individual charges against any of them and gave none an opportunity to appeal. The Supreme Court upheld the exclusion in 1944, ruling it a military necessity, a decision that stood as valid precedent for 74 years until the Court explicitly repudiated it in an unrelated 2018 case.
Why it matters
Because the order's own language never mentioned Japanese Americans specifically, it gave a wartime removal applied almost entirely to one ethnic group, citizens included, the appearance of race-neutral process. Congress did not formally apologize or pay compensation to survivors until the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, forty-six years after the order was signed.
How we know
The National Archives holds the original signed Executive Order 9066 among its milestone documents, reproducing its exact operative language, and its accompanying research guides, compiled from War Relocation Authority administrative records kept at the time, provide the 122,000-person total, the citizen count, and the list of camp locations.
Sources
- National Archives, Milestone Documents. Executive Order 9066: Resulting in Japanese-American Incarceration (1942) · Primary source (author-declared)archives.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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