On this day in 1942, 10 weeks after a Japanese carrier force bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order that led to the forced removal of some 112,000 Japanese-Americans, most of them U.S. citizens, from their homes, to be relocated in internment camps in remote locations away far from the West Coast.

Of 127,000 Japanese-Americans 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 second-generation, U.S.-born Japanese who held U.S. citizenship or third-generation children. The rest were first-generation immigrants born in Japan who were ineligible for U.S. citizenship at the time under U.S. law.