Japanese American internment
From RationalWiki
The Japanese American internment refers to the period of time from February 1942 to the end of World War II when 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were moved to ten "relocation camps" in the western United States. Ostensibly, these camps were to remove the threat of Japanese espionage agents on the west coast of the United States. However, many commentators have raised questions about the effectiveness of such a program, preferring to call the relocation a racist swipe against Japanese-Americans. 62% of the internees were United States citizens, the rest being resident aliens on United States soil. Several hundred internees were of German and Italian ancestry as well.
The prevailing attitude in the United States is that the camps were unjustified and racist, a result of "wartime hysteria". This viewpoint is affirmed by Article I, Section 9 (guaranteeing the writ of habeas corpus), and the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution (which states that no person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law").
Others point to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 as justification for the relocation (despite the law applying only to resident aliens, which doesn't justify imprisoning several thousand Nisei American Citizens), and cite Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus during the American Civil War.
Michelle Malkin wrote a lovely anthology of how to use logical fallacies pro-internment book, called In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror. It talks about a few specific cases of disloyalty by Japanese-Americans, which is then used as justification for detaining all of them based on race.
