Executive Order 9066 is best described as a policy that authorized internment of which group during WWII?

• A. Japanese Americans
• B. German Americans
• C. Italian Americans
• D. Mexican Americans

Answer: (A)

Executive Order 9066 embodies a wartime policy that allowed the removal and confinement of a specific group from certain areas in the United States. In 1942, federal authorities used it to authorize the establishment of exclusion zones and the relocation of people of Japanese ancestry to internment camps inland, a drastic step taken on the West Coast after Pearl Harbor. About 120,000 Japanese Americans were affected, most of them U.S. citizens, and their property and civil liberties were severely impacted by this action. The move sprang from a mix of wartime fear and racial prejudice, rather than proven disloyalty. Other groups, such as German or Italian Americans, were not subjected to mass internment under this order, and Mexican Americans were not interned as a group under this policy.