[1] Italian immigrants had been allowed to gain citizenship through the naturalization process during the years before the war, and by 1940 there were millions of US citizens who had been born in Italy.
Some 1,881 were taken into custody and detained under wartime restrictions; these were applied most often by the United States Department of Justice to diplomats, businessmen, and Italian nationals who were students in the US, especially to exclude them from sensitive coastal areas.
Defined in terms of national origin, it was the largest ethnic community in the United States, having been supplied by a steady flow of immigrants from Italy between the 1880s and 1930.
The U.S. grouped together many types of persons, including pro-Fascist Italian businessmen living for a short time in the U.S. and trapped there when war broke out, anti-Fascist refugees from Italy who arrived a few years earlier intending to become U.S. citizens but who had not completed the process of naturalization, and those who had emigrated from Italy at the turn of the 20th century and raised entire families of native-born Italian Americans but who had not become naturalized.
Aware of the possibility of the war eventually involving the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, to compile a Custodial Detention Index of those to be arrested in case of national emergency.
More than a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Department of Justice began to list possible saboteurs and enemy agents among German, Japanese, and Italian Americans.
1947) This law, in part, directed the U.S. Attorney General to conduct a comprehensive review of the treatment by the U.S. Government of Italian Americans during World War II and to report on its findings within a year.
[21] The lists include: Separately, in 2010, the California Legislature passed by an overwhelming margin a resolution apologizing for US mistreatment of Italian residents in the state during the war, noting restrictions and indignities, as well as loss of jobs and housing.