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(Thursday, February 19, 1942; during the internment of Japanese Americans, part of World War II) — President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 today, authorizing the secretary of war to prescribe certain areas as military zones and clearing the way for about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom lived on the Pacific Coast, to be forcibly relocated and incarcerated in concentration camps in the western interior of the country.

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These actions were ordered two months and 12 days after Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.

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Of the 127,000 Japanese Americans who were living in the continental United States at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, 112,000 resided on the West Coast. About 80,000 were Nisei (literal translation: ‘second generation’; American-born Japanese with U.S. citizenship) and Sansei (‘third generation’, the children of Nisei). The rest were Issei (‘first generation’) immigrants born in Japan who were ineligible for U.S. citizenship under U.S. law.

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Notably, far more Americans of Asian descent were forcibly interned than Americans of European descent, both in total and as a share of their relative populations. Those relatively few German and Italian Americans who were sent to internment camps during the war were sent under the provisions of Presidential Proclamation 2526 and the Alien Enemy Act, part of the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798.