Japanese Internment Camps

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On February 19, 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive order 9066 ordering all Americans of Japanese ancestry to evacuate the West Coast. About 127,000 Japanese-Americans lived in the United States, majority on the West Coast, according to the census of 1940. Almost all of those 127,000 were stripped of their rights, liberty, and their title of “American citizen”. After the attack on Pearl Harbor people began to think that all Japanese-Americans posed as threats as spies and were only loyal to their heritage. After nonstop requests and listening to advisers, President Roosevelt signed the executive order. All citizens of Japanese ancestry were forced into one of the ten internment camps that were made. Japanese internment …show more content…
After the announcements of the situation the evacuation had to start immediately. The Japanese-Americans could only bring what they could fit in a suitcase, so almost all of their other belongings were lost. Businesses they owned, gone. Jobs they had, gone. Homes filled with precious memories, gone. Just like that, the Japanese-American community in the United States was destroyed. Thousands of innocent people had their freedom taken away because they were thought as threats. Life in the camps were very dull and depressing. A lady named Mary Tsukamoto wrote, “But I will never forget the shocking feeling that human beings were behind this fence like animals [crying]. And we were going to also lose our freedom and walk inside of that gate and find ourselves…cooped up there…when the gates were shut, we knew that we had lost something that was very precious; that we were no longer free." By sending them to the internment camps it was also taking away their rights and liberty as a citizen of the United States of America. This also goes against a famous quote from the Declaration of Independence which states, “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; …” The Japanese-Americans that either moved to the U.S. or was born on its soil was and forever will be an American Citizen who did not deserve their
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