Alternative Facts: The Lies of Executive Order 9066

-We had the intelligence. We had the information. We knew that Japanese Americans were not a threat to national security, but decided to incarcerate them anyways. -Although president Reagan acknowledged that the incarceration of Japanese Americans was a mistake,

he stopped short of calling it what it really was

a scandal of epic proportions. -This mass incarceration really rested upon a foundation of intentional falsehoods. -My grandmother once told me when she was incarcerated during World War II for being Japanese, her parents had her tear pages from old magazines and stuff them between the gaps in the floorboards of their barracks. Her job was to try to keep the dust from getting inside and all over everything.

I doubt she was very successful.

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he stopped short of calling it what it really was

We had the intelligence. We had the information. We knew that Japanese Americans were not a threat to national security but decided to incarcerate them anyways. And because there are parallels between what was happening then and now, is pretty scary.

REPORTER 1

Donald Trump defending himself tonight, even comparing himself to FDR.

REPORTER 2

Demonstrators around the nation picket President Trump's new order banning travelers from seven countries designated as having ties to terror. If you create fear and demonize an entire group, we saw what that led to, and we're starting to head in a very similar direction.

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REPORTER 2

The first time I remember learning about incarceration was during my 11th grade US History course. And I remember my History teacher was

trying to weigh both sides

so, why it could be justified that it happened, and why it was viewed as problematic. And I think I was really frustrated because she didn't say it was wrong. I think it makes me so sad because none of this was based on facts. It wasn't based on evidence.

It wasn't based on logic or reason. It was based on a political agenda, a very harmful and racist political agenda.

JOSEPH

Although President Reagan acknowledged that the incarceration of Japanese Americans was a mistake,

he stopped short of calling it what it really was

a scandal of epic proportions.

MIKA

Long ago, this school was once the headquarters of the Western Defense Command. Within these walls, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt issued military orders that would imprison an entire racial group. But the seeds of the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans were sown long before 1942.

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MIKA

-In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, and it's the first federal law that excludes an entire racial group. And it was passed because white labor, primarily in California, thought that Chinese were presenting competition in the gold mines. Once that Exclusion Act is passed, you see people are looking for another cheap labor source. And they just so happened to turn to the Japanese.

When the Japanese came over to the West Coast, they were essentially leasing and purchasing land that was unwanted by the white American population at the time, because they believed that it was land that was not good, it was not fertile, and that nothing could be grown there. But then you see the Japanese get there, and they start creating really productive farms. It's become Central California. And today, we're so used to seeing and thinking of Central California as really fertile farmland, and it's the Japanese who bring life to this land.

Then the rest of the white American farming population realized that the Japanese Americans are so productive, and there is a lot of fear that Japanese Americans are gonna take over the Central Valley. The Asiatic Exclusion League forms in 1905. And so, anti-Japanese and anti-Asian sentiment, in general, is growing. And as a result, in 1924, the US federal government passes the Immigration Act, which then effectively bans all Asian immigration into the United States.

JOSEPH

While anti-Japanese sentiment grew, several key figures emerged who would wage a fierce battle over the fate of Japanese Americans. -John DeWitt was an administrator. His career in the Army had been as a supply officer, but he diligently worked his way up the chain of command so that by the late '30s, he was a Lieutenant General. He was pushing retirement age, and it was pretty clear that the post at the Presidio was gonna be his last.

-My stepfather got out of law school really in the depths of the Depression, clerked for a federal judge, and went into the Justice Department. And this was a time, of course, of the Roosevelt administration. And many of the very, very bright and able young people who went into the Justice Department were very much motivated by the ideals of the New Deal. -Well, Francis Biddle came from a very aristocratic, privileged background.

He was very new in the job, and he was very deferential, not only to President Roosevelt, but also to the other members of the Cabinet who were more senior -Dad was the first-named administrative assistant to any president. They only had three secretaries, very small staff. And he went over to the Justice Department in late 1941 as the assistant to the Attorney General, which was the equivalent today of Deputy Attorney General. -The Navy had primary jurisdiction over the so-called Japanese American national security problem.

It had completed a two-year study on the extent that the Japanese American population might at all be dangerous. And just before the war broke out, the study was completed.

PETER

Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Ringle of the Office of Naval Intelligence, who was in charge of surveilling the Japanese-American community on the West Coast, and was the most knowledgeable. "Navy Lieutenant Ringle reported that the entire Japanese problem has been magnified out of its true proportion, largely because of the physical characteristics of the people. It should be handled on the basis of the individual and not on a racial basis."

MIKA

Animosity towards Japanese Americans was reaching a boiling point with news of Imperial Japanese aggression spreading across Asia. And then....

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PETER

Frank Knox, who was the Secretary of Navy at the time, had been told that there were Japanese on Oahu that had collaborated with, and in fact had known in advance, about the Pearl Harbor attack. "After Pearl Harbor, rumors and lies quickly gained traction as facts. Headlines blared news of Navy Secretary Frank Knox's claim that Japanese-American saboteurs were responsible for Pearl Harbor." Now, this was then magnified 100-fold by the press on the West Coast, had all these stories about, oh my god, there's this Japanese fifth column. And the more lurid the stories, the more newspapers you sell.

-At that time, the air was full of phony stories, all false. There was no evidence of any sabotage by the Japanese-American population or Japanese-alien population.

DON

Federal Communications Commission was the intelligence agency overseeing and monitoring the entire airwaves. The Radio Intelligence Chief is a person by the name of George Sterling.

MIKA

To respond to General DeWitt's growing concerns about potential sabotage, in January of 1942, George Sterling was deployed to assist the staff of the Western Defense Command.

DON

Sterling says the General went on this long discourse, evidently believing and convinced that there were Japs with transmitters operating on the West Coast. And Sterling goes on that he's never seen a Intelligence staff so hopeless to cope with radio transmissions. They're staffed by privates who can barely read 10 words a minute. They take bearings on radio stations transmitting out of Tokyo, and they call them shore-to-ship transmissions.

They report these to the General, and the General, knowing no better, takes their word for it.

JOSEPH

After investigating over 700 reports of illicit signaling, General DeWitt was informed that there was not a single case that involved Japanese Americans.

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JOSEPH

-I went out and talked to Lieutenant General DeWitt. He wanted the civilian authorities, the Department of Justice, to intern more Japanese aliens than we were interning. It was our view that really a minimum program was required. He did not, however, at that point in December, contemplate anything as large as removal of civilian population from the West Coast.

-This General DeWitt's desk. "I'm very doubtful that it would be common sense procedure to try and intern 117,000 Japanese. An American citizen after all, is an American citizen. So, he didn't even believe in what he did.

BILL

DeWitt is today considered synonymous with the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The beginning, he was fairly reticent to do that. In stepped Karl Bendetsen. -Karl Bendetsen was sent from Washington DC to assist General DeWitt.

Mr. Bendetsen claimed he knew the Japanese mind. He grew up with Japanese, so he knew how they thought. And he claimed to be sort of an expert.

-He said that Japanese Americans are an enemy race. And while the second and third generation have "Americanized," the racial strains are undiluted. So therefore, along the Pacific Coast are potentially 112,000 enemies of the United States.

PETER

Even though Bendetsen was junior to him in rank, he maneuvered DeWitt in ways that served his purpose. And Bendetsen's purpose was pretty clear all along, that he wanted a full-scale evacuation. -When I first saw DeWitt early in December, I don't think it ever occurred to him that he would be allowed to give a military order which would say that all the states of California and Oregon and Washington are barred to American citizens of Japanese ancestry as well as aliens. He didn't move in that direction until he learned by political events, not military events, political events, that he would be supported in such an action.

-White American farmers lead a lobbying effort for a rounding up and a removal of this population that they view as competition. -The Farmer Growers Association was a very, very powerful political organization. They had very strong connections with the congressional delegation. -Farm interests in California saw an opportunity to take the property and the lands of the Japanese Americans.

-It was a perfect storm of opportunism for people who wanted to get rid of Japanese Americans.

MIKA

"We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do.... They came into this valley to work, and they stayed to take over.

And we don't want them back when the war ends either."

JAMES

Dad certainly heard from Congress in this debate, and he understood the pressure they were under. Because he knew that they were in the business of getting elected and that they were gonna be in trouble.

BILL

The congressional delegations of all three of the West Coast states were in favor of doing something to curb this potential fifth column. But probably the most outspoken advocate of internment was California's Attorney General, Mr. Earl Warren.

DON

When the war broke out, it gave a platform for politicians to build their careers. So, Earl Warren ran for governor on the slogan that the Japs must go.

JAMES

Dad would point out to his children, "Don't think you know it all." You're a big believer in the liberal court of Earl Warren. You should know. He was on the wrong side of this. He was a politician then, and he had high ambition.

-A budding politician with great ambitions, without principles is a dangerous combination. -Warren had put together using records from local counties in the Federal Census Bureau and other sources of exactly where Japanese Americans were living.

NARRATOR

Houses and hotels occupied almost exclusively by Japanese were within a stone's throw of a Naval Air Base, shipyards, oil wells. Japanese farmers were living close to vital aircraft plants.

PETER

But farms had been there long before the plants were constructed or the bases were set up. But Warren did say to DeWitt and other members of the War Department that this might be evidence that there's some collective conspiracy among the Japanese.

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There was clear tension between these two sides

the Justice Department people, the War Department people. They had a final showdown where Attorney General Biddle had a meeting in his living room. This was the last chance they had to derail this push. Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, was the elder statesman of the Cabinet.

He'd also served in the Cabinet under President Wilson. So, he spanned both World War I and World War II. And the Assistant War Secretary John McCloy had a legal career that was really outstanding. He'd worked his way up and become a very prominent Wall Street lawyer.

And he was a political operative. -On the 17th, they were still battling. But Stimson and McCloy went to the White House and said, "We need this" to President Roosevelt. And that message was delivered to Francis Biddle.

That was not known by Mr. Ennis and Mr. Rowe, my dad, and they were just stunned at that meeting at Biddle's house.

The Executive Order draft was whipped out at the meeting

"Here's the order." And the first reaction dad had is laughing. "Are you kidding? How could you write this? Are you nuts?" And then just being furious, and then to being dumbfounded.

Dad said, "And then the realization hit me that Francis has been quiet, Ed is being a terrier, and I'm stunned that this executive order has been decided on." -And I was told by Ennis when I talked with him years ago, driving back from Biddle's house, he literally was in tears. He was devastated that this internment was going to happen.

DON

On February 19th, 1942, President Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066. Congress then follows up with Public Law 503. General DeWitt begins issuing military orders governing a civilian population. And the first of those that Japanese Americans could not leave the states of Washington, Oregon, California, and Arizona.

And within three weeks later, DeWitt issued another proclamation saying Japanese Americans could not remain in these states. Only way that people could comply with Public Law 503 was to report to a military detention facility. Put it simply, Japanese Americans lost their freedom incrementally. What began as a race-based curfew ultimately culminated as a race-based imprisonment.

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DON

-My great-grandmother was the Principal of the Kinmon Gakuen, which is the Japanese school here. And it was also one of the locations that the buses came to pick people up to take them off to camp. So, that's where they boarded the bus. We went back to Tule Lake as a family, where three of my grandparents were incarcerated, and I stood at the site.

At that moment, the only thing that I could think about was my grandfather. He was the same age that I was when I was there, which was 19 years old. And it just hurt because that was my flesh and blood that was there. -My grandfather is second generation Japanese-American.

He was Kibei. So, Kibei is a special classification. He received education in Japan. So, I found out a lot later that he was kind of viewed as more threatening and more suspicious during the war.

These stories weren't really talked about in my own family. What I had in my family was a lot of anger and hurt.

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DON

There are three gentlemen who, each on their own, made stands of conscience.

PETER

Min was the first person to bring a challenge to any of the military orders. Min had decided to get himself arrested for curfew violation. He went downtown in Portland after the curfew hour and walked around the streets trying to find a police officer. -I walked over three hours, and during that period, I got tired of walking up and down 3rd Avenue, so I did approach a police officer.

I asked the officer to arrest me. -I was confronted with certain values that I held high, the various principles of American citizenship. If I were to go along with the order, I would have to kind of restructure all of those values, so I decided to disobey the law. -When the evacuation notice came, I was 21 then.

When you're at that age, you have a girlfriend, and she was more important to me than anything else. After the internment had taken place and there were resistors, the ACLU board ordered their chapters in those cities not to support those challenges. But the branches in Seattle and in San Francisco directly defied them, and they provided lawyers. -Their trials were very fast and very simple, consisting of, "Are you Japanese American?

Did you violate Public Law 503? And if so, you're guilty." Each of these three gentlemen decided to appeal their convictions. These cases ultimately wound their way up to the US Supreme Court. Gordon Hirabayashi and Min Yasui's case was heard in 1943, and the court heard the constitutionality of the curfew.

But in 1944, Fred's case was mass deprivation of your freedom. The government defended against the challenges of these three litigants on two grounds. One, that Japanese Americans were committing acts of espionage and sabotage as reported by General DeWitt's staff. And then secondly, that Japanese Americans were so ethnically different that you couldn't trust them.

The difficulty of the government's position at that time is not a single Japanese American was ever accused of espionage or sabotage, let alone convicted. And so basically, they were trying to justify the arrests of these three individuals for violating Public Law 503. But at the same time, they were trying to justify the entire program. -They had no evidence in the Supreme Court.

There was nothing to indicate that they were disloyal. They needed to get some information in the Supreme Court to allow them to rule in favor of the government upholding the exclusion and the curfew programs. So, that devolved on Bendetsen and DeWitt to produce a final report.

DON

And the government throughout this process were saying, "The reason why we couldn't hold loyalty oaths to individual determinations is because we didn't have time to do it. It was an emergency. These people posed a danger. We had to act immediately."

DALE

The original DeWitt report written by Bendetsen was essentially racist, saying that, well, the reason that we're doing this exclusion and imprisonment of Japanese Americans is it's impossible to tell the loyal from the disloyal. It's impossible to separate the "sheeps from the goats." When John McCloy saw this report, he was incensed. He says, "We can't argue this in the Supreme Court. You've got to change it."

AIKO

McCloy had objected to so many points, Bendetsen said, "Don't worry 'cause we only printed 10 copies."

DALE

Well, they changed that around 180 degrees to one that was patently racist, that you can't tell the loyal. from the disloyal,

to one that's more palatable

oh, we just didn't have time. -John J. McCloy ordered the original final report and all the copies returned and burned.

AIKO

I saw a memorandum from Theodore J. Smith Warrant Officer Junior Grade that said, "I have witnessed the destruction of the DeWitt report." And it turned out they could not find one copy, the 10th copy. And nobody seemed to worry about it much.

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PETER

Edward Ennis, who had lost the battle over evacuation, was in charge of preparing the government's brief to the Supreme Court when the Korematsu case came before it.

DON

Ennis is looking to confirm and incorporate the facts of DeWitt, that Japanese Americans were engaging in espionage and sabotage. And so, he begins to call up these reports, thinking that he's going to incorporate this evidence within the government's brief. And in searching for the evidence,

he finds the opposite

that there is no evidence. Among the documents he found was the Office of Naval Intelligence Report. They not only say that Japanese Americans pose no danger, but it actually recommends against this rounding up that happened. He writes to the Solicitor General of the United States, a guy by the name of Charles Fahy.

-The Solicitor General is the nation's chief representative to the United States Supreme Court. The Solicitor General speaks not just for the President, but also for the Congress of the United States.

DON

And Ennis says, "It occurs to me that if we don't disclose the contents of the Navy report to the court, that we are engaging in the suppression of evidence." -A lawyer who prepares a brief has a responsibility not to knowingly certify anything, not to say anything that you know to be false. And in the real world, there are different degrees, differing degrees to which lawyers take that seriously. He took it very seriously.

DALE

In that DeWitt report, you don't find any specific facts showing Japanese Americans are disloyal. Instead, what you have is a bunch of suggestions. -That Japanese Americans were monitoring our critical infrastructure, monitoring our troop movement, and somehow signaling through mirrors and shortwave radio signals to Japanese submarines that were right off of the coast.

There was only one problem with that story

it was completely made up.

DON

Ennis writes to the FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, and basically says, what about these reports by DeWitt of illicit signaling by Japanese Americans? And J. Edgar Hoover writes back, "We've investigated every single claim of shore-to-ship radio transmissions, and we could find no evidence on which prosecution would lie."

PETER

Ennis got in touch with James Lawrence Fly, who was the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. He prepared reports, which they sent to Ennis, which concluded that there was no substance to any charge that Japanese Americans had committed acts of espionage or sabotage. -We had that investigated by both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and by the Federal Communications Commission. And we got reports that there was no records, and their records were complete, of any such signaling.

DON

Ennis enlists the help of a fellow Justice Department lawyer by the name of John Burling. -When the final draft of the government's brief to the Supreme Court in the Korematsu case was being prepared, John Burling decided to insert a footnote. It was a cautionary footnote that said, "We are in possession of information that contradicts General DeWitt's final report, particularly as it involves the commission of acts of espionage and sabotage by Japanese Americans." In this case, the stakes and the consequences were so high, by this time, almost 120,000 Americans had already been deprived of their freedom. They were imprisoned.

The Supreme Court briefs are printed in booklets. The brief actually goes to the printing presses. John J. McCloy found out about the footnote.

He contacted Solicitor General Charles Fahy, and Fahy ordered the printing presses stopped. The original footnote that John Burling drafted was deleted. -At the oral argument, the Solicitor General absolutely stood behind General DeWitt's report. So, this attempt to alert the Supreme Court that this roundup, this mass incarceration really rested upon a foundation of intentional falsehoods failed.

And that case stood for 40 years.

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AIKO

Jack, my husband, he had a job at the Pentagon. We lived near the National Archives. Since I had this luxury of being so close now, I wanted to take advantage of it. So, Jack would drop me off at the National Archives, and I would spend the whole day starting to see what kind of information the government had about me or my family.

I was shocked to find what kind of detailed papers they had on the Japanese. I would stay there all day. Jack would come and join me for lunch. Then he'd go back to work in the afternoon.

I'd continue. He'd come back for dinner. We'd go out to dinner. And then sometimes he'd come back with me to the Archives, and we would work together.

We did this for several years. When I heard that the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians was being established, they were looking for people to staff it. And I thought, you know, I've been doing research now for several years. Maybe I could help out.

So, I joined the Commission as a researcher. The Commission was set up to find out why it happened and what happened to the people. It was a good move because that way, I had more authority, more access. -In 1981, I decided to write a book about the internment cases.

So, I went down to Washington and went to the National Archives and went in and asked one of the archivists if she had any records of the internment and these cases. And she said, "Well, we have records of the War Relocation Authority." So, we went back in the stacks of the archives, and she said, "They're not here. Somebody must have them out." So, we went down to the main reading room, and there was a large stack of boxes. And she said, "I think the person who's looking at them is over at that table." And I went over, and there was this very petite Japanese-American woman who was looking through them.

-I noticed that when I was sitting there at the desk that here was this man going back and forth and just looking over me, my shoulder. And I finally said, "Would you like to have something?" And he said, "I just wondered if, when you're finished with these papers, if I could see them." -And she said, "I don't understand much of the legal stuff in here. But you could maybe help me understand this, and maybe I could help you with your research." So, we, on the spot, developed a pact, really, between the two of us that we would do our independent research and share it with each other. I called over to the Justice Department Freedom of Information Office, and I said, "I'm trying to find the files for the internment cases during World War II, the Korematsu, Hirabayashi, and Yasui cases." And he said, "We can't find those files anywhere." And a couple of weeks later, I got a telephone call that said, "We finally found the documents you're looking for." They were stored in a warehouse in Maryland.

They'd been there since the 1940s, and they had been misfiled as records that belong to the Commerce Department, not the Justice Department. Now, at that time, nobody, including myself, had any idea what was in these files. They were in three cardboard boxes that were covered with dust and wrapped in twine. And it was obvious that nobody had even opened or looked at these documents for 30-some years.

So, I immediately opened one box, which said "Korematsu versus United States." And I pulled out the first folder, and at the top of this folder was a memorandum from Edward Ennis to Solicitor General Fahy that said, "We are telling lies to the Supreme Court." And it immediately struck me that this was of tremendous significance. So, I started going through the whole boxes and eventually compiled probably 100 pages of documents. And the people in the Commerce Department said, "Well, you'll have to leave them here with us, and we will review them and see if there's anything that needs to be removed or redacted." And I immediately thought, if I give them back to them, I might never see them again. So, I called Aiko at her office at the Commission right on the spot and said, "Aiko, I found some very important documents, but they're not gonna let me take them." So, Aiko came down.

And she had a sheet of paper in her hand, and it was a letter that gave her authority to examine any document related to the internment and to take possession of that document for the Commission.

DON

Peter was one of the rare people who would realize that there's a way to reopen these legal cases. Most have a shelf life, and you have a shot at reopening it during this window. But after that window expires, you're done. But Peter was aware of this little known writ called the writ of error coram nobis.

And it doesn't have a statute of limitations, and you can use it to clear your name. -Just about the same time, I was in touch with archivist, his name was Ed Coffee. When I went into his office, I saw that this book was sitting on the corner of another table right next to him. And so, I think he was on the telephone, so I just went over to take a look at the book.

I said, "Whoa, this is the DeWitt report." But it was not bound the same way as a copy you might find today. It looked more raw. It was not a finished product. I took the liberty of flipping through it.

Then I recognized right away this is that missing 10th copy. Because I had just recently seen the memo asking for changes. So, I've connected that to it because it had a notation drawn on the margin that corresponded with the suggestions made in the memo. And I said, "Do you know what this book is about?" He said, "Yeah, it's the DeWitt report." I said, "Yeah, but it's the first version and the lost 10th copy of the first printing." At that moment, it was just my mind just got blown away.

Yeah. It was something to discover. It's like finding a diamond and not realizing its value. -It shows original, unaltered thoughts that people really high up in these war departments thought.

And without this one surviving copy, we wouldn't know that this is what they thought. -I think the worst part about the government concealing all evidence of the racism that was involved in the final decision-making, the worst part about it is that it doesn't surprise me at all. It very much falls into the pattern of how the American government treats people of color. -This was a real bombshell.

So, putting together the documents that I had collected about the lies to the Supreme Court and the documents that Aiko collected about presenting the court with a false report from General DeWitt, it was clear to me that there might be a chance of reopening these cases. At that point, I decided that I should find out if Fred Korematsu and Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui, would they be interested in reopening their cases. And this, of course, was not a guaranteed thing. But I finally did track down all three of these gentlemen.

Gordon and Min were very eager to do this. And Fred Korematsu was initially quite reluctant, but I came out to San Francisco anyway and met with Fred. We sat in his living room, and he just read through the documents again very carefully and quietly and didn't say a word. And at the end of it, he looked up at me and said, "Mr.

Irons, are you a lawyer?" And I said, "Yes, I am." And he said, "Would you be my lawyer?" And I realized right then that with Fred and Gordon and Min, that we had a chance to get their cases back in court. And called Min Yasui in Denver and said, "I'd like to go ahead with this, but I don't know any lawyers in San Francisco or Portland or Seattle." And Min said, "Well, I don't either, but there's a lawyer in Los Angeles that I know pretty well, a man named Frank Chuman." So I called him, and he said, "Well, there is a lawyer I know in San Francisco named Dale Minami."

DALE

When Peter called me he said, "I found this evidence that the Supreme Court was lied to, that government officials altered, suppressed, and destroyed evidence to win these cases." So, I thought, "Okay, let's see the evidence," being a lawyer, being skeptical. Sends me the papers. I share it with our work group. We look at those papers, and I think, holy shit.

This guy has the goods. He has things that lawyers just dream about, smoking guns.

DON

When we assembled the team, we couldn't tell anybody what we're doing. We kept it entirely secret. And we had to raise money in order to support this effort. We'd go to our friends and say, "We can't tell you what we're working on, but it's really important.

And give us money to do it." People did. They opened up their wallet, trusting us. -The challenges were immense. We had to deal with 40-year-old convictions.

The evidence was gone and witnesses were dead. The legal standards had changed. And nobody had ever in the history of this jurisprudence of this country had alleged that a fraud had committed on the Supreme Court. So, we're doing this for the first time.

-I took that sheaf of documents, and I went home to have dinner with my parents. So, I'm showing them memos saying, "It is highly unfair to this racial minority that these lies, put out in an official publication," meaning the Supreme Court decision, "are not corrected." When my parents read that, it's like the dam broke.

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DON

-There's still a lot of pain in the Japanese-American community because we all know somebody who was incarcerated, and we know them as people, as human beings. They're not part of an agenda. They did nothing wrong. -You know, this was a case that was very personal.

1943 and 1944, the Supreme Court validated what the government did. We had no arms. We didn't have any weapons to fight those arguments until Peter found these documents. And we could give our proponents of redress in Congress a weapon to use.

In January of 1983, we filed our petition with the court. The documentation in our petition included evidence from the government's own files that government lawyers had intentionally destroyed and altered and suppressed evidence in these cases. Government lawyers also presented to the court false evidence regarding the commission by Japanese Americans of acts of espionage, acts that the government knew to be false. We thought that not only could we retry history, which we had to do, not only could we overturn the convictions of these three courageous men, we could set the historical record straight.

We could make sure that this country knows that what was done to Japanese Americans was a travesty and a great injustice. The case was a case of a lifetime.

REPORTER

Fred Korematsu went back to court to clear his name. On November 10th, 1983, his conviction was overturned.

DON

I think it's a great victory. I think Japanese Americans view these cases as the trials that they never had. And I think while Fred feels naturally vindicated for all he went through, I think Japanese Americans who experienced the same thing have to feel some degree of vindication as well.

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DON

-In 1944, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was one of the dissenters in the Korematsu case, writes in his dissenting opinion really prophetic words. He said, "The court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination. The principle then lies around like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority who could put forth a plausible case of an urgent need." -First story we're covering involves a controversial executive order concerning travel to America. It follows through in a campaign promise Mr.

Trump made to tighten US borders and stop certain refugees from entering the country. The Council on American Islamic Relations says there's no evidence that refugees are a threat to US national security. And over the weekend, a number of legal challenges were made to the order. -Right now I have the privilege of serving as lead counsel for the state of Hawaii as well as the largest mosque in Hawaii in challenging President Trump's so-called travel ban.

If you rule for him, you defer to the president in a way that history teaches us is very dangerous. You open the door to so much. -The parallels between the travel ban case and the Korematsu and Hirabayashi cases have been the subject of a lot of discussion. -There is a controversy tonight inside US intelligence over whether the Trump administration is exaggerating the threat from Muslim countries.

ANCHOR

This internal DHS Intelligence document was leaked to the media. It determined citizens of the seven banned countries were rarely implicated in US-based terrorism. It was rejected by DHS leadership, and the White House pressed for a new assessment. -We decided that it was appropriate for the children of Gordon Hirabayashi, Min Yasui, and Fred Korematsu to submit an amicus brief, and we hoped that the court heeds the warning that these brave petitioners stood for.

-What the President is arguing is that the courts don't have the power to review my decision. Well, that's exactly what happened in Korematsu. The courts refused to review the president's decisions and just gave in to whatever the military and the executive said, and we had a civil rights disaster.

DON

The court decided that, in times of international hostility, it is gonna abdicate its constitutional role to be a check and balance on the presidency. -Immigration activists have waited a long time for this day for the US Supreme Court to hear arguments over President Trump's travel ban. -This court has been on the wrong side of history. This is the building where decisions were made that oppressed my people for hundreds of years.

-We hope the Supreme Court makes the right decision today.

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DON

-The Supreme Court has upheld the President's right to enact this travel ban.

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DON

-The Supreme Court has failed us yet again today. This is how dictators get started, when there is no check and balance. -Regardless of what the government says, the Muslim ban is still unconstitutional.

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DON

-If we look at the state of this country right now, we're nowhere near righting those wrongs. The Supreme Court has finally said that the Korematsu decision was wrong, but then they turn around and allow the government to use the exact same logic to oppress another group of people based on a so-called national security threat. And now, our president has also signed an executive order to indefinitely detain migrant families. -Take a look at what FDR did many years ago, and he's one of the most highly-respected presidents.

MIKA

We're nowhere near being a country that cares about the protection of everyone's rights. We're not there.

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MIKA

Because of the war, many people were very afraid. When people are scared, they sometimes do things that hurt other people because they think it will protect them. People thought all Japanese people were bad, even though Japanese Americans did nothing wrong.

AIKO

We have to teach our kids...that hate never wins. Hate never wins.

MIKA

So, everyone had to wear these name tags that told you....

AIKO

That we to need, most of all, to respect the differences, not make fun of it or not think that differences make us better. There's still hope for this country.

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AIKO

-How can we, today, show compassion towards other groups that are being affected by very similar rhetoric, by very similar policies? -As students, our voices hold a lot of power, and our words hold a lot of power. And this story gives us so much potential to find solidarity with other people who need our support. -I think it's important to constantly educate when we're able to, whether it's to those in elementary school or those on our college campuses.

It's important to let them know that this happened. This was a real thing. -I do think that when people read about Japanese-American incarceration in textbooks, it is only a paragraph or one lecture. And that's not enough.

-We don't wanna talk about the Native Americans and what we did. We don't wanna talk about slavery. And we certainly don't wanna talk about the Japanese-American internment. But if we don't talk about it, we don't grow.

We don't learn. -It's quite a remarkable story of, on the one hand, failure of democracy, on the other, faith in this country. -I hope that we can reach a place where we can acknowledge all the pain that we've put, not just Japanese Americans but all minorities in this country through, because we're different. And I think we really need to change what it means to be an American.

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AIKO

-Aiko Yoshinaga-Herzig, in including her husband, Jack, are really unsung heroes in uncovering what really happened to Japanese Americans.

MIKA

I wanted to ask you how you felt when you found the final report, and you realized what it is? What was going through your head? -I think my head was about to bust.

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MIKA

Because when I realized that it was this 10th missing report, I thought, gee, what are we gonna do with this? -And for her to go through those reports line by line, word by word, and understanding the significance of what she found was amazing to me. -When we got a ruling from Judge Marilyn Hall Patel in Fred's case, the final report was one of the stated reasons why Fred's conviction was thrown out. -So, Aiko's contribution in that one area was absolutely central, I think, to the winning of the coram nobis cases, and in a way, to the whole redress effort.

JON

I don't know that redress would've ever happened if that report wasn't found. -Well, I never thought about it that way. Let me we think about it. Oh, that's good.

I'm glad to know that that was.... Sometimes it's being in the right place at the right moment. -Well, she was also not just a shrinking violet researcher type. She was assertive, and she was articulate.

She testified in Gordon's case in Seattle. And in fact, the judge was so impressed with her and quoted her testimony in his decision. -You know the phrase "Never Again?" Some of us who were in the Asian movement were carrying placards, and when we walked the streets of New York, "Never Again." And I think it's up to us as former victims, that if we see something wrong, we should say something.