LAD/Blog #35: FDR's Executive Order #9066

Tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan were interned in camps at the behest of President Roosevelt by his Executive Order #9066. This order gave the military the power to ban any citizen from the fifty to sixty milewide coastal area  from Washington state to California and extending inland into southern Arizona. The order also authorized transporting these citizens to assembly centers set up and governed by the military in California, Arizona, Washington state, and Oregon. The same executive order as well as other wartime orders and restrictions were also applied to smaller numbers of residents of the United States who were of Italian or German descent. For example, 3200 of Italian background were arrested and more than 300 of them were interned. About 11000 German residents, including some naturalized citizens, were arrested and more than 5000 were interned. While such groups suffered violations of their civil liberties, the measures applied to Japanese Americans were worse by far, uprooting entire communities and targeting citizens as well as resident aliens all because of a pervading wartime paranoia.