Concentration Camps

Dec. 7 Pearl Harbor Day! The U.S. began mass incarceration in concentration camps of Japanese Americans very quickly after Pearl Harbor, just two months after the attack,

During World War II, over 120,000 people of Japanese descent, the majority being U.S. citizens, were forcibly removed from the West Coast (California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona) and some from Hawaii without trial. This policy was later acknowledged as a grave injustice, leading to official apologies and reparations through the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

An ICE detention center opened this year at Fort Bliss in El Paso, which was used to imprison people of Japanese descent during WW II, will be able to hold as many as 5,000 detainees making it the largest federal detention center in U.S. history.