The American concentration camps of WWII were established in the early 1940s: "In response to racist and xenophobic wartime hysteria" President Roosevelt signed an executive order "that gave the army power to exclude whomever it saw fit under the guise of 'military necessity.'"

"President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066—which gave the army power to exclude whomever it saw fit under the guise of “military necessity”—on February 19, 1942."

At first Japanese Americans were encouraged to move on their own. The government called this "voluntary evacuation." After only 5,000 out of 110,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast chose to move the US Army quickly built 17 facilities and started rounding people up.

"Located in desolate desert or swamplands throughout the West and in Arkansas, these 'relocation centers' [concentration camps] were surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, and were still being completed when the first inmates began to arrive."

"While the vast majority of Japanese Americans chose to obey the army’s exclusion orders, a few chose to challenge aspects of the exclusion and incarceration."

https://densho.org/learn/introduction/responses/

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