9/11 response and WWII Japanese American internment

As soon as Islamic extremists were identified as having carried out four deadly, coordinated attacks on American soil in the early morning of September 11, 2001, US Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta started hearing calls from the public to ban Arab Americans and Muslims from all flights – and even to round them up and detain them.

In the chaotic hours and days following the attacks, Mineta did not yet know that his childhood incarceration by the federal government in the aftermath of Japan’s Pearl Harbor bombing nearly 60 years earlier would be a crucial element in decisions about how the George W. Bush administration responded to 9/11.

Enduring the wartime hardships

Earlier that spring, President Bush had invited Mineta and his wife, Deni, to spend time at Camp David, the presidential retreat. One night after dinner, the president asked Mineta about his imprisonment during World War II.

For three hours, Mineta, an 11-term member of Congress who also had served as President Bill Clinton’s secretary of commerce, shared his experience of wartime detention and its effects on him and his family.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had issued an executive order authorizing the military to round up and remove people of Japanese descent from their homes on the West Coast. Mineta, his parents, three sisters and a brother were among the approximately 110,000 men, women and children of Japanese ancestry who were escorted by armed guards to hastily constructed government detention facilities in desolate inland locations.

Without any charges brought against them, they were held under harsh conditions for the duration of the war simply because they were the same race as the enemy.

Mineta’s parents, Kunisaku