Internment of Italian Americans in the context of Fascist Italy (1922–1943)

Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor took place on December 7, 1941. The United States military suffered 19 ships damaged or sunk, and 2,403 people were killed. Its most significant consequence was the entrance of the United States into World War II. The US had previously been officially neutral and considered an isolationist country with its Neutrality Act but subsequently after the attack declared war on Japan the next day and entered the Pacific War. Then on December 11, 1941, four days after the Japanese attack, after the Italian declaration of war on the United States and the German declaration of war against the United States, which Hitler had orchestrated, the US was then at war with Germany and Italy. The US then became involved in the Battle of the Atlantic and the European theatre of war as well as with Japan.

Following the attack, the US interned 120,000 Japanese Americans, 11,000 German Americans, and 3,000 Italian Americans.

During World War II, the United States forcibly relocated and incarcerated about 120,000 people of Japanese descent in ten concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), mostly in the western interior of the country. About two-thirds were U.S. citizens. These actions were initiated by Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, following Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. About 127,000 Japanese Americans then lived in the continental U.S., of which about 112,000 lived on the West Coast. About 80,000 were Nisei ('second generation'; American-born Japanese with U.S. citizenship) and Sansei ('third generation', the children of Nisei). The rest were Issei ('first generation') immigrants born in Japan, who were ineligible for citizenship. In Hawaii, where more than 150,000 Japanese Americans comprised more than one-third of the territory's population, only 1,200 to 1,800 were incarcerated.

Internment was intended to mitigate a security risk which Japanese Americans were believed to pose. The scale of the incarceration in proportion to the size of the Japanese American population far surpassed similar measures undertaken against German and Italian Americans who numbered in the millions and of whom some thousands were interned, most of these non-citizens. Following the executive order, the entire West Coast was designated a military exclusion area, and all Japanese Americans living there were taken to assembly centers before being sent to concentration camps in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Arkansas. Similar actions were taken against individuals of Japanese descent in Canada. Internees were prohibited from taking more than they could carry into the camps, and many were forced to sell some or all of their property, including their homes and businesses. At the camps, which were surrounded by barbed wire fences and patrolled by armed guards, internees often lived in overcrowded barracks with minimal furnishing.

The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were a set of four United States statutes that sought, on national security grounds, to restrict immigration and limit 1st Amendment protections for freedom of speech. They were endorsed by the Federalist Party of President John Adams as a response to a developing dispute with the French Republic and to related fears of domestic political subversion. The prosecution of journalists under the Sedition Act rallied public support for the opposition Democratic-Republicans, and contributed to their success in the elections of 1800. Under the new administration of Thomas Jefferson, only the Alien Enemies Act, granting the president powers of detention and deportation of foreigners in wartime or in face of a threatened invasion, remained in force.

After 1800, the surviving Alien Enemies Act was invoked three times during the course of a declared war: the War of 1812, and the First and Second World Wars. Of these three invocations, the Alien Enemies Act is best known as the legal authority behind the internment of German Americans during both World Wars, as well as internment of Italian Americans and, to a lesser extent, Japanese Americans during World War II. In March 2025, President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act as his authority for expediting deportation of foreigners; this invocation is subject to ongoing litigation.
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