Japanese-American women interned at the Tule Lake Relocation Center. Newell, California, 1942
The internment of Japanese Americans was the World War II confinement of between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese heritage who lived on the Pacific coast of the United States. The U.S. government ordered the removal of Japanese Americans in 1942, shortly after Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. The internment was applied unequally as a geographic matter: almost all who lived on the West Coast were sent to camps, while in Hawaii, where 150,000-plus Japanese Americans comprised over one-third of the population, only 1,200 to 1,800 were interned. Sixty-two percent of the internees were American citizens.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the internment with Executive Order 9066, issued February 19, 1942, which allowed local military commanders to designate "military areas" from which "any or all persons may be excluded." This power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire West Coast, including all of California and much of Oregon, Washington and Arizona, except for those in government camps. Approximately 5,000 "voluntarily" relocated outside the exclusion zone, and some 5,500 community leaders arrested after Pearl Harbor were already in custody, but the majority of mainland Japanese Americans were "evacuated" from their West Coast homes over the spring of 1942. The United States Census Bureau assisted the internment efforts by providing confidential neighborhood information on Japanese Americans. (The Bureau denied its role for decades, but it was finally proven in 2007.) In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the removal when Fred Korematsu's appeal for violating an exclusion order was struck down. The Court limited its decision to the validity of the exclusion orders, avoiding the issue of the incarceration of U.S. citizens
...In 1980, under mounting pressure from the Japanese American Citizens League and redress organizations, President Jimmy Carter opened an investigation to determine whether the need to put Japanese Americans into internment camps had been justified by the government. He appointed the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) to investigate the camps. The Commission's report, titled “Personal Justice Denied,” found little evidence of Japanese disloyalty at the time and recommended the government pay reparations to the survivors. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act, which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government and authorized a payment of $20,000 to each individual camp survivor. The legislation admitted that government actions were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership". The U.S. government eventually disbursed more than $1.6 billion in reparations to 82,219 Japanese Americans who had been interned and their heirs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans