Korematsu v. United States (1944) was one of the worst Supreme Court rulings in the history of America, an enormous suppression of civil liberties that is often overshadowed by World War II. This great time is often looked upon as a courageous fight for democracy and freedom. In reality we were completely contradicting ourselves by discriminating against Japanese Americans and relocating them to what were effectively concentration camps; this process was called Japanese internment.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, in February 1942, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 allowing the US military to declare parts of the US, as military areas and thereby excluding specific groups of people from them. Presidential Executive Order 9066 and congressional statues gave the military authority to exclude citizens of Japanese ancestry from areas deemed critical to national defense and potentially vulnerable to turning on the US. The result was that the order authorized the US government to forcibly roundup 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry into 10 internment camps. At this same time, the Canadian government interned 26,000 Japanese Canadians.


These Japanese Americans were forced to evacuate their homes and leave their jobs, and in some cases, family members were separated and put into different camps. President Roosevelt himself classified the 10 areas as