Rabid anti Japanese American racism surfaced the first days after Pearl Harbor. The FBI and the military had been compiling lists of "potentially dangerous" Japanese Americans since 1932, but most were merely teachers, businessmen or journalists. Even these lists totaled only about 2,000 names in a community of 127,000 (37% were aliens, known as Issei, the rest American-born Nisei, who theoretically had the same rights as other citizens). Though there was no evidence of a single case of Japanese-American espionage throughout the war, FBI agents on the afternoon of Dec. 7 began to detain suspected "subversives." They swooped down on a Los Angeles baseball field, for example, to apprehend members of a team called the L.A. Nippons. Within two months, 2,192 "suspects" had been jailed. The U.S. Constitution is supposed to protect citizens against arbitrary arrest, but a U.S. law of 1924 had virtually forbidden Japanese immigration and extension of American citizenship, so most of the arrested suspects were classified as "enemy aliens."
On Dec. 29, 1941, Lieut. General John L. DeWitt ordered all Japanese aliens in the eight states in his Western Defense Command to surrender their shortwave radios and cameras.
While some questioned the constitutionality of wholesale deportations, California Governor Culbert Olson demanded action. So did the ambitious state attorney general, who would someday become Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Earl Warren. Said DeWitt: "A Jap is a Jap."
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