After Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, issued executive order 9066 by which, in order to avoid sabotage and espionage actions, he authorized the Armed Forces to remove people that it considers convenient of sensitive areas of the country and to transfer them to detention centers.
Fred Korematsu, a 23-year-old boy born in Oakland (California) of a Japanese father, decided to challenge the detention order and carry on his life as a US citizen, for which he even performed a small plastic surgery operation to modify his physical appearance and look a little less Japanese.
Despite this, the young man was arrested in May 1942 and prosecuted for violating executive order 9066, for which he was sentenced to a five-year probationary period and then sent with his family to one of these internment camps in Utah.
With the help of lawyers from the United States Civil Liberties Union, Korematsu took his case to the Supreme Court on the grounds that his sentence was discriminatory and contrary to the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution.
However, in December 1944, the high court agreed in a split decision 6 to 3 that his detention was not an act of racism and was justified by the Armed Forces' remarks that Japanese-born Americans were prone to disloyalty and they were helping enemy ships from the coast through the emission of radio signals.
The Court considered that the detention of persons of Japanese origin was a national security measure taken amid the emergency caused by the war.
In one of the three dissenting opinions, Judge Robert Jackson questioned the absence of evidence that justified the confinement of these citizens.
"The Court has forever validated the principle of racial discrimination," he said. "That principle now remains as a loaded weapon, ready in the hands of any authority that can present a credible argument of urgent need."
