Sunday marked the 84th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor bombing – a shocking attack that drew the U.S. into World War II and unleashed a wave of anti-Japanese hysteria that had been bubbling for decades.
While America would join the Allies in a global fight against fascism and Nazi concentration camps, the nation was erecting camps of its own at home — forcing Japanese Americans into internment without any due process.
Run by the U.S. War Relocation Authority, two of those 10 main camps were built in Arizona — both upon tribal lands.
‘A date which will live in infamy’
It all began with the surprise bombing of military installations by 350 airplanes from the Imperial Japanese Army on Dec. 7, 1941– resulting in 2,403 souls lost at the naval base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu.
The USS Arizona sustained the most casualties: 1,177 crew members in all.
Sunken remains of that very battleship can be seen inside a 5-acre memorial garden located at the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community near Scottsdale. The last survivor of the USS Arizona, 102-year-old Lou Conter, died in April 2024. A dozen or so veterans who witnessed that brazen attack are believed to be still alive today.
Just one day after the attack, the U.S. was suddenly swept into the Pacific Theater.
“And we’re going to fight it with everything we’ve got,” said President Franklin Deleanor Roosevelt, delivering his “Day of Infamy” speech on Dec. 8, 1941. “Not only must the shame of Japanese treachery be wiped out, but the forces of international brutality, wherever they exist, must be absolutely and finally broken.”
FDR immediately invoked the Alien Enemies Act — a 1798 wartime law authorizing the president with broad powers to legally detain and deport anyone suspected of engaging in treasonous acts.
Believing them to be potential spies and saboteurs, anyone with Japanese ancestry was deemed an “alien enemy” in the eyes of the U.S.
Weeks later, in February 1942, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, directing the secretary of War to herd more than 120,000 people with Japanese ancestry into camps in Arizona, California, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho and as far east as Arkansas.
Most of them resided in California on the U.S. mainland.
Those Japanese Americans living in Hawaii — making up more than a third of the then-territory’s population – were exempt from that executive order out of economic necessity.
But thousands voluntarily resettled elsewhere — before the camps got built by 1942. As for those who didn’t, the rest registered with the U.S. and were rounded up, having no choice but to sell their homes and liquidate their businesses.
Two-thirds of prisoners were American-born citizens.
‘America was pretty discriminatory’
First lady Eleanor Roosevelt empathized with the internees, even touring a camp south of Phoenix in April 1943. That trip to the Gila River Indian Community, where the camp was constructed in spite of tribal opposition, was her catalyst for social change.
While there, Eleanor Roosevelt made remarks that sounded almost like an apology, saying “to undo a mistake is always harder than not to create one originally but we seldom have the foresight.”
And from then on, she would help draw attention to the plight of confined Japanese Americans, in part, by penning political writings through “My Day,” her nationally syndicated daily newspaper column.
Three days after that visit, the first lady urged the swift release of Japanese Americans in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, warning “if we don’t look out we will create another Indian problem.”
Once she left the Southwest, Roosevelt would even persuade her husband to meet with Dillon Myer, director of the War Relocation Authority, in hopes of persuading the U.S. Army to release the prisoners.
Barbara Perry, a historian specializing in first ladies, explained that Roosevelt was simply ahead of her time, “and certainly on how she viewed Japanese Americans, but she couldn’t convince her husband of that.”
“It’s not really the role of a first lady to be making policy,” added Perry. “But I’d call it pillow talk. You know, they may be the last person the president sees at night – at least those couples who have good marriages.”
Perry, who is co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, also points out precedent was set more than a century prior – when President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and marched tribes west of the Mississippi River.
Some Indigenous peoples — like a few thousand Japanese Americans would do a century later during World War II — peacefully left. But many resisted, and 60,000 Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles and Muscogee Creeks were forced at gunpoint out of the Southeast by the U.S. Army.
That months-long trek to Oklahoma — the Trail of Tears — led to thousands dying along the way, largely due to disease, starvation and harsh weather. Similarly, the U.S. War Relocation Authority documented 1,862 deaths inside its 10 WWII internment camps – often linked to extreme heat or cold and lacking health care.
More than a quarter of those deaths — 521 — happened in Arizona.
“One would like to think that by the 1940s we were in a better place involving the treatment of Americans of a different color, nationality or ethnicity,” said Perry. “But you didn’t have very many people come to the aid of the Japanese Americans and fight for them. America was pretty discriminatory.”
Since then, Perry feels the U.S. has made progress, citing President Ronald Reagan’s public apology to Japanese American internment camp survivors for “grave wrongs.” He signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 – providing reparations in the form of $20,000 one-time payments to 60,000 living survivors.
“This bill has less to do with property than with honor. For here, we admit a wrong. Here, we reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law,” said Reagan, adding “for throughout the war, Japanese Americans in the tens of thousands remained utterly loyal to the United States.”
Those held captive lost an estimated $1.3 billion in property and $2.7 billion in net income, as calculated in 1983 by the bipartisan congressional Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians.
“This action was taken without trial, without jury. It was based solely on race,” Reagan reiterated, noting “it’s not for us today to pass judgment upon those who may have made mistakes while engaged in that great struggle. Yet we must recognize that the internment of Japanese Americans was just that — a mistake.”
And when some worried that history could repeat itself in the wake of 9/11, George W. Bush came to the defense of Arab Muslims and their faith. Bush didn’t sow further division but tried to bring America together — even going so far as to recite a passage from its holy book at a mosque just a few miles from the White House.
“The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Quran itself,” said Bush at the Islamic Center of Washington. “In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule.”
“The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” added Bush. “ That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.”
‘We’ll do it at a level nobody has ever seen before’
Despite not being at war — a declaration only Congress can authorize — President Donald Trump still reinvoked the Alien Enemies Act on the first day of his second term, citing it in his inaugural address.
Before that, the Alien Enemies Act had been invoked just three times: during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II.
This time, Trump has directed the government to use the “full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement to eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks, bringing devastating crime to U.S. soil, including our cities and inner cities.”
“And that is exactly what I am going to do,” added Trump. “We will do it at a level nobody has ever seen before.”
This proclamation wasn’t surprising to John Woolley, co-director of the American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara. It’s an idea that Trump has been floating long before he ever became commander in chief again, coupling the 1798 wartime law with his militarizing immigration agenda.
“He didn’t describe in great detail what he’s going to do, but he does begin on the campaign trail,” said Wooley. “He talks about this Venezuelan gang, that he’s going after them.”
Shackled with shaved heads, hundreds of Venezuelan migrants with alleged ties to the Tren de Aragua gang were deported to an El Salvador mega-jail back in March — including some who had no criminal record.
Further deportations were put on hold until the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in to lift that ban, allowing for such removals to resume under the Alien Enemies Act.
The Trump administration is ramping up third-country deportations — a legal measure used rarely — letting the U.S. send deportees to places beside their country of origin. So far, a dozen or so countries — from Guatemala and Mexico to Rwanda and South Sudan — have agreed to accept them in exchange for compensation.
From “Charlotte’s Web” in North Carolina to Chicago’s “Midway Blitz,” the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement – better known as ICE – is even mimicking military code names for its immigration sweeps, all part of Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
Trump during his second term is shifting focus to the homefront, thinking that’s where the nation’s threats are coming from. And after the Republican-led Congress approved Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill this summer, ICE is now the nation’s highest-funded law enforcement agency.
This blurring of military and immigration operations is most visible under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who, along with Trump, is pushing to return the agency’s moniker back to the Department of War. The Defense Department name change was done by President Harry Truman in 1947.
Video of a Dec. 4, 2025, kinetic strike on a vessel in international waters
Under Hegseth’s direction, the Pentagon has been striking boats transporting suspected narco-terrorists in the Caribbean through “Operation Southern Spear.” Now, Hegseth is facing war crime accusations for ordering nearly two dozen kinetic strikes — killing more than 80 people.
No matter whether on land or sea, Woolley believes Trump’s invasion of immigrants is imaginary — paling in comparison to Pearl Harbor, which compelled the U.S. to break its neutrality and enter World War II.
“In the context of a real, serious live war, this is a domestic political rallying point that is very powerful with Donald Trump’s base,” said Woolley. “[Suggesting] that we’re under threat by these hordes who are surging across the border — who are criminals, child and drug traffickers – pouring into our country without any kind of regulation.”
“And that’s basically not true, and was never true.”
