On February 19, 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 which granted the secretary of war and his commanders the power “to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded.” While no specific group or location was mentioned in the order, it was quickly applied to virtually the entire Japanese American population on the West Coast, with the largest population affected living in California.
When the law went into effect, 2,500 students of Japanese ancestry were enrolled in college campuses on the West Coast with about 700 of them studying at the University of California and 500 at UC Berkeley.
Mary Oyama, a woman who wrote her experiences in an article called "My Only Crime is My Face" detailed a similar interruption saying that they “got on the buses and said goodbye - perhaps forever - to that old free civilian life [they] had loved so well.” The Executive Order was met with intense backlash and was seen as a violation of constitutional rights.
This executive order lead to the infamous Supreme Court trial known as Korematsu v. United States in which the Court ruled in a 6 to 3 decision that the federal government had the power to arrest and intern Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu under Presidential Executive Order 9066, thus legalizing the internment and confinement of Japanese Americans present in the United States.
Beginning in February 1942 and ending in July 1948, JERS was conducted through World War II in response to the forced relocation and incarceration of 110,000 persons of Japanese heritage, 70,000 of which were American citizens, all living on the West Coast of the United States who were interned due to the fear of Japanese espionage following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Their findings were recorded in several volumes, the first of which was called “The Spoilage” which analyzes the experiences of the detained group, some 18,000 in total, whose response was to renounce America as a homeland.
Taylor, Sandra C. “Leaving the Concentration Camps: Japanese American Resettlement in Utah and the Intermountain West.” Pacific Historical Review 60, no.