Due to the large number of Japanese Americans detained there, these two camps were briefly ranked as the fifth- and sixth-largest towns in Arkansas.

1492 into law authorizing $38,000,000 in federal money to preserve the Jerome relocation center, along with nine other former Japanese internment camps.

[dead link‍] After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 brought the United States into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was lobbied to sign Executive Order 9066, which authorized military leaders to declare the West Coast a military zone from which persons considered "a threat to security" could be excluded.

They forced the "evacuation" of 120,000 Japanese Americans; whole families were rounded up and deported to concentration camps newly constructed in isolated areas of the country's interior.

The Jerome site was situated on 10,054 acres (4,069 ha) of tax-delinquent land in the marshy delta of the Mississippi River's flood plain, which had been purchased in the 1930s during Depression relief efforts by the Farm Security Administration.

Rife Construction Company of Dallas, Texas, working under the supervision of the Army Corps of Engineers, built the Jerome camp at a cost of $4,703,347.

Most prisoners had lived in Los Angeles or farmed in and around Fresno and Sacramento before the war, but some ten percent of Jerome's population was relocated from Hawai'i.

The Issei, or first-generation, immigrant parents and grandparents had been prohibited by US law from obtaining citizenship, along with other East Asians, were officially referred to as "aliens".

The remainder of the prisoners were sent to Rohwer in Arkansas and the Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona, constructed on the Pima/Maricopa reservation.

Project Director Paul A. Taylor warned residents that leaving the camp without permission and trespassing on private property were punishable offenses.

The hospital at Jerome was acknowledged as the best equipped and best staffed of any WRA center, and provided enough medical assistance to alleviate most health problems.

The Phi Beta Society consisted of a group of young women whose main purpose was to improve their cultural background.

Adult education classes included English, sewing, drafting, flower arrangement, commercial law, photography and art.

Pressure to join the all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team was somewhat higher at Jerome and Rohwer, which were much closer to the unit's training facilities at Camp Shelby, Mississippi.

Col. Scobey, executive to the Assistant Secretary of War, visited Jerome on March 4, 1943 to persuade eligible internees to enlist in the 442nd.

He said that the War Department was in effect presenting the 442nd as a test of loyalty, and if few men signed up, the public would believe the Nisei were not loyal Americans.

Others, especially among the citizen Nisei, were offended by the implication that they were somehow un-American yet ought to fight to risk their lives for a country that had imprisoned them and overridden their rights.

[9] Due to an earlier dispute with administration over working conditions in Jerome and the death of an inmate in an on-the-job accident, tensions in camp were already high.

Jerome inmates subsequently gave negative or qualified responses to the question regarding Japanese allegiance at a rate higher than at any other WRA camp.

Kimura, who was born in Hawai'i in 1919 and attended high school in Japan from 1932 to 1935 before returning to the U.S. territory, was described by a Naval Intelligence informant as a "very dangerous type of individual."

But the Denson Tribune reported on June 11, 1944 that the "camp was free from juvenile delinquency (...) young girls and boys are well-behaved, well disciplined, well-trained, well-taught, and well led.