Hirabayashi V. United States - Facts

Facts

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, American public opinion initially stood by the large population of Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast, and believed that their loyalty to the United States was unquestionable. Six weeks later, though, public opinion turned against Japanese Americans living in on the West Coast, as the press and other Americans became nervous about the potential for fifth column activity. Though the administration (including the President Franklin D. Roosevelt and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover) dismissed all rumors of Japanese-American espionage on behalf of the Japanese War effort, pressure mounted upon the Administration as the tide of public opinion turned against Japanese-Americans.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an Executive Order 9066 which permitted the Lieutenant General DeWitt (as head of the military for most of the Western United States) to confine and exclude certain persons from "military areas," regardless of their ancestry or country of citizenship. Over the course of several weeks, LTG DeWitt imposed several public proclamations, which first imposed a curfew upon resident aliens of Japanese descent and upon Japanese-Americans. Then, later orders confined Japanese and Japanese-Americans to Military Area No. 1, where Hirabayashi lived. Then, on May 3, 1942, DeWitt issued an order requiring Japanese and Japanese-Americans to report to offices, where they would be taken to relocation centers. (At the time, the terms "relocation centers," "internment camps," and "concentration camps" were used interchangeably.)

The defendant, Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi, was a University of Washington student, who was accused of violating the curfew order, a misdemeanor based upon Executive Order 9066 and a subsequent Congressional statute designating the violation of military orders in Military Area Nos. 1 and 2 a misdemeanor. The Justice Department knew that someone would challenge all of the three substantive elements of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's orders affecting Japanese-Americans: curfew, exclusion, and internment. The FDR administration, and particularly the Department of Justice and Francis Biddle sought out test cases it could use to establish favorable precedent and prepare itself for a case that could challenge the entire internment policy.

Hirabayashi was convicted of violating a curfew and relocation order, and his appeal of this conviction reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court heard both the Hirabayashi case and Yasui v. United States during the 1942-1943 term, and released the opinions as companion cases on June 21, 1943. The Court upheld the curfew order in both the Hirabayashi and Yasui cases, and the defendants were sent to internment camps.