The Incarceration of Japanese Americans Was Illegal Interview with Peter Irons and David Loy

In 1942, thousands of Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast and sent to incarceration camps following Executive Order 9066. It took decades for the U.S. government to recognize and publicly apologize for these actions. What caused this change? A successful effort by a legal team in the 1980s to overturn the criminal convictions of Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui.

Peter Irons, a current law clerk at UCSD and a member of that legal team, discovered documents decades ago that the government attempted to alter and hide in 1981. Find out how things played out in this conversation between Irons and David Loy, legal counsel for ACLU San Diego. director.

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