By P.C. Staff
The Japanese American Citizens League today — the Day of Remembrance — issued a statement connecting the significance of an executive order signed by the president of the United States 83 years earlier, under the political status quo then, and the many executive orders — several of which have already been contested in courts — that have come from the White House in 2025.
On Feb. 19, 1942, a little more than two months after America’s declaration of war on Japan following its Dec. 7 attack on the naval base at Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. It would set in motion the forced removal from the West Coast and subsequent mass incarceration of all persons of Japanese ancestry, most of whom were U.S. citizens.
In its statement, JACL said, “We now have a resurgence of calls to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, Alien Land Laws, broad harmful immigration policies that will lead to family separations and deportations of U.S. citizen children, and the perversion of civil rights laws that have been critical to ensuring qualified people from all backgrounds have a chance to demonstrate their capabilities when they might be otherwise overlooked.”
By 1988, the Japanese American community and those who supported its stance, used the First Amendment right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” and the United States issued an apology for its actions and paid token monetary remediation. This followed a report from the U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians that concluded what had happened to ethnic Japanese in the U.S. at the time was not a matter of “military necessity” but, rather, “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.”
To read the JACL’s entire statement, visit here.
