LOS ANGELES, Aug. 28 -- The U.S. government owes damages and an apology to more than 2,000 people of Japanese ancestry deported from 13 Latin American countries to U.S. internment camps during World War II, a class action lawsuit filed Wednesday alleges. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, seeks compensation and a public apology for as many as 2,264 men, women and children who were deported from Latin America to U.S. internment camps as anti-Japanese sentiment spread following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The suit accuses the U.S. government of orchestrating the mass deportation, then failing to 'address the wrongdoing committed' against the Japanese-Latin Americans. 'Despite the fact that there was never any credible evidence that they were a threat to their own countries or to the United States, they were unlawfully stripped of their citizenship papers, imprisoned in the United States, on the ground that they were illegal immigrants,' the lawsuit charges. 'The unstated purpose of this illegal program was to use them for prisoner exchange with Japan.' A coalition of civil rights groups said at least 300 Japanese-Latin Americans have been denied redress under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 because they were not U.S. citizens or permanent resident aliens. The law authorized the payment of $20,000 to all Japanese-Americans forced into the camps because of the war. Among the plaintiffs named are Carmen Mochizuki, 64; Alice Nishimoto, 63, and Henry Toshio Shima, 73, now of Los Angeles, who were living with their families in Peru when they were deported to an Immigration and Naturalization Service detention camp in the United States in 1943.
The National Coalition for Redress/Reparations, the Japanese-American Citizens League and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California are involved in the effort to get compensation for the Japanese-Latin Americans.
