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In the Review’s April 24 issue, Francisco Cantú writes about the aftermath of Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which authorized the indefinite detention of more than 125,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese American citizens, who were “thrust into an existing infrastructure of immigrant detention. Many ended up in camps that previously or simultaneously held migrants—and some even ended up in facilities staffed by US Border Patrol agents where they were forced into labor alongside Mexican border crossers slated for deportation.” More than eighty years later, as the United States continues to lock people away in camps in the desert, Cantú asks:

Is there any right way to memorialize the injustice of Japanese American incarceration, the afterlife of which is ongoing in the mass internment of migrants languishing in detention centers all around us?

Below, alongside Cantú’s essay, are five articles from our archives about America’s concentration camps.

Francisco Cantú
Legacies of Japanese American Incarceration

The Afterlife Is Letting Go, Brandon Shimoda’s book about how survivors and descendants of the United States’ Japanese internment camps try to keep their families’ histories alive, is also a look at the brutal system of migrant detention that continues to this day.

Tausif Noor
Kelly Akashi’s Ecology of Craft

“Akashi’s representation of anonymous human hands speaks to the human labor that cultivates and grafts the trees that bear flowers and fruit—cultivation that was done in the camps by internees. In her use of stones and cast lead crystal, the work engages both a centuries-long material history of material production and a geologic history that goes back further still. Bridging these disparate scales of time through her artwork is a way of accounting for her family’s distance from American culture and society after their internment.”

—May 13, 2023

Andrea Pitzer
‘Some Suburb of Hell’: America’s New Concentration Camp System

“Exile, theft, and forced labor can come later, but in the beginning, detention itself is usually the point of concentration camps.”

—June 21, 2019

Robert W. Gordon
How the Justices Get What They Want

“[In the 1940s] a Court stacked with liberals delivered some of the most illiberal decisions in its history. The low point was surely its decisions in cases that challenged the military’s authority to relocate 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent in internment camps and congressional legislation making disobedience to military orders a crime.”

—December 8, 2011

David Cole
In Case of Emergency

The historical record should caution us against encouraging widespread preventive detention in the name of national security.

—July 13, 2006

Garry Wills
Someone to Watch Over You

Since Americanism is something to be striven for daily, and to be demonstrated on demand, there is a presumption that any citizen is not American until he or she proves it. That is why politicians are introduced as “great Americans,” or real Americans, or true Americans. There are no un-English activities committees or un-French committees. Why un-American? Because the full protection of our laws is not given automatically. You must earn it by demonstrating a patriotic mentality.

—November 13, 1975

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