US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia believes that internment camps can happen again in America. The longest serving justice also stated that the nation’s highest court would uphold such camps. Scalia made the shocking comments while speaking to a University of Hawaii law school class.
Justice Scalia had this to say during the discussion about the Japanese internment camp, which sparked a lawsuit in 1944:
“Well of course Korematsu was wrong. And I think we have repudiated in a later case. But you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again. [Panic] that’s what was going on. The panic about the war and the invasion of the Pacific and whatnot. That’s what happens. It was wrong, but I would not be surprised to see it happen again in time of war. It’s no justification, but it is the reality.”
During World War II the US Supreme Court ruled that President Franklin D. Roosevelt did have the power to prosecute Japanese American citizens who refused to enter internment camps. Roosevelt assumed such power via the signing of an executive order.
Then Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts had this to say in his dissent brief:
“It is the case of convicting a citizen as a punishment for not submitting to imprisonment in a concentration camp, based on his ancestry, and solely because of his ancestry, without evidence or inquiry concerning his loyalty and good disposition towards the United States.”
The Korematsu vs. United States case began in 1942 when federal law enforcement officers ordered folks of Japanese descent along the West Coast to move into “assembly centers” or relocation camps for national security reasons. The “evacuation” into what were deemed by many to be nothing more than concentration camps, did not involve any type of due process or even a single hearing. Some Germans and Italians were also ordered onto internment camps as well.
Fred Korematsu, a Japanese American, refused to comply with the national security order and was arrested. He appealed the arrest on Constitutionality grounds. Korematsu steadfastly maintained that the forced internment was a Fifth Amendment violation. In 1944 the US Supreme Court upheld Korematsu’s conviction – the vote was six to three.
Then Justice Robert Jackson had this to say in his dissent brief:
“No claim is made that he is not loyal to this country,” Jackson wrote in his dissent. “There is no suggestion that apart from the matter involved here he is not law-abiding and well-disposed. Korematsu, however, has been convicted of an act not commonly a crime. It consists merely of being present in the state whereof he is a citizen, near the place where he was born, and where all his life he has lived.”
Do you think internment camps could happen again in America?
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