![]() National Archives and Records Administration On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which allowed the Secretary of War and other military commanders to establish military zones where people, including citizens, could be excluded from these areas1. Public Law 503, enacted in March 1942, allowed courts to enforce military orders given resulting from Executive Order 90662. This led to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. There was some opposition to the incarceration, leading to several court cases in an attempt to overturn the executive order. Despite these efforts, the Executive Order 9066 was not overturned until late 1944, with the case of Ex parte Mitsuye Endo in which the Supreme Court ruled that the Executive Order was unconstitutional since two-thirds of the population being incarcerated were Japanese Americans who were United States birthright citizens and were stripped of their rights as citizens because of their ethnicity3. 1President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Executive Order 9066. February 19, 1942. 2United States, National Archives and Records Administration, Our Documents: 100 Milestone Documents from the National Archives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 10. 3Brian Niiya. “Ex parte Mitsuye Endo” Densho. Accessed July 12, 2019. http://encyclopedia.densho.org/Ex%20parte%20Endo |
Last updated: August 16, 2019