It was established by the United States government in 1935 during the Great Depression for vocational training and work relief for young men, in a program known as the Civilian Conservation Corps.

[2] The 23-building camp included a duck hospital[citation needed], an administrative headquarters office, the supervisors' residences, and a lookout cabin on the bluff behind the Refuge Visitor Center.

The program provided unskilled manual labor jobs related to the conservation and development of natural resources in rural lands owned by federal, state and local governments; workers built water control structures of timber and concrete.

The CCC's Camp Tulelake became a War Relocation Authority (WRA) Isolation Center (a prison like that of Moab, UT and Leupp, AZ) in February 1943.

It was approximately 10 miles from the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, which was one of 10 WRA concentration camps built in 1942 to incarcerate Japanese Americans evicted from their homes on the West Coast.

The strikebreakers were brought in to harvest the local crops and were paid significantly higher wages than what Tule Lake inmates could earn.

[5][6] In December 2008, both sites were designated as part of the Tule Lake Unit, World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument.

A notable inmate was Frank Tanabe, who volunteered to serve in a mostly Japanese-American military unit, interrogating Japanese prisoners in India and China.

[2] In 2012 Modoc County, California officials applied for a grant from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fund a new 8 feet (2.4 m) tall and 3 miles (4.8 km) long fence around the nearby Tulelake Municipal Airport, to keep animals off the runway.

It would surround the site of most of the prison's barracks — nearly 46 complete "blocks" and portions of several others — impeding visitors and desecrating the physical and spiritual integrity of the camp.

"[citation needed] The opponents note that being excluded from the area would especially affect former internees and their descendants, who make regular pilgrimages to the former incarceration site and their specific assigned barracks.

[4][6] "They want to traverse the site to experience the dimension and magnitude of the place, to gain a sense of the distances family members walked in their daily routine to eat meals, attend school, to do laundry and use the latrines.