War Relocation Authority

The War Relocation Authority (WRA) was created by Executive Order 9102 on March 18, 1942, a month after Executive Order 9066 authorized the military to exclude designated groups from parts of the West Coast. The WRA, led first by Milton Eisenhower and then by Dillon S. Myer, was the civilian agency responsible for administering the resulting system of ten camps — including Manzanar, Tule Lake, Poston, and Heart Mountain — where people of Japanese ancestry, roughly two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, were held without individual charge or trial.

Role in Documented Cases

The WRA’s camps are the central subject of this archive’s file on the Japanese-American Incarceration. The agency managed the daily administration of confinement, from housing and labor programs to a loyalty questionnaire used to sort and further segregate detainees. The Supreme Court upheld the legal basis for the exclusion underlying the WRA’s mission in Korematsu v. United States (1944), a decision that has since been widely repudiated by legal scholars and was formally disavowed, in dicta, by the Supreme Court itself in 2018.

Accountability

Congress established the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in 1980 to review the program; its 1983 report, Personal Justice Denied, concluded that the incarceration was not driven by military necessity but by “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Separately, Fred Korematsu’s original conviction was vacated by a federal court in a 1983 coram nobis proceeding after historians uncovered evidence that wartime officials had suppressed intelligence contradicting claims of Japanese American disloyalty. In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which issued a formal government apology and authorized redress payments of $20,000 to each surviving detainee, eventually reaching more than 80,000 recipients. No WRA official was prosecuted for the agency’s role in the program.

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