On this day in 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued his most-controversial executive order, an act that sent more than 100,000 people to government-controlled facilities because of their ethnicity.
On December 7, 1941, Japanese military forces attacked the United States base in Hawaii without warning. More than 2,000 Americans died in the attack, and a united Congress answered President Roosevelt’s request for war.
Roosevelt issued Presidential Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942,, after fears generated by the Japanese attack made the safety of America’s West Coast a priority. He directed the military to isolate any citizen, if needed, from a 60-mile-wide coastal area from Washington state to California and extending inland into southern Arizona.