The Hill News

Seventy years ago this week, 425 men from California entered a detention camp in Santa Fe, New Mexico for the first time.  As prisoners of the United States Department of Justice, their hands were bound behind their backs, but by any legal measure they were innocent.

Their only crime was their heritage: Japanese. As leaders of Buddhist churches, teachers of Japanese language, or business owners with ties to Japan, the FBI had been spying on them months before the Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor. On the night of December 7, 1941, arrests began.

While Americans may generally know the U.S. government incarcerated Japanese Americans from the West Coast starting in February 1942, far less is known about the Department of Justice-run camps, and even less is known about the peculiar practice the U.S. government undertook to pad these prison populations with people living in South America.

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