The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, 50 U.S.C. App. § 1989, as amended, was enacted by the United States Congress to: acknowledge the fundamental injustice of the evacuation, relocation, and internment of United States citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese ancestry during World War II; apologize on behalf of the people of the United States for the evacuation, relocation, and internment of such citizens and permanent resident aliens; discourage the occurrence of similar injustices and violations of civil liberties in the future; and make more credible and sincere any declaration of concern by the United States over violations of human rights committed by other nations.
This Act, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, and the Courts have denied redress to Americans who suffered the same harms but whose ethnicity is not Japanese.
This denial is a violation of the constitutional rights of the Americans of European ancestry who were evacuated, relocated, and interned in the United States during World War II. Persons so denied continue to suffer injury to their Fifth Amendment equal protection rights.
Unbeknownst to many researchers, historians, or legal scholars is the fact that in 1993 the Office of Redress Administration (ORA) of the Department of Justice made at least 75 exceptions to this law for persons of Japanese ancestry who entered camps voluntarily, that is to say these 75 persons were not forcibly interned. The ORA "declared that the claimants were eligible for payment on the basis that their liberty had been unlawfully constrained. It ruled that despite their voluntary entry into the camps, the claimants were not free to leave without written permission, and, therefore, that they were eligible for compensation under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988....'They were clearly denied their liberty,' said James P. Turner, Acting Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Rights Division." The ORA two page press release on this matter may read at ORA Press Release Editors note: The Americans of European ancestry who entered camps voluntarily were also unlawfully restrained.