American Internment Research Articles

Beneath Heavy Pines in World War II Louisiana: The Japanese American Internment Experience at Camp Livingston by Hayley Johnson and Sarah Simms (review)

Beneath Heavy Pines in World War II Louisiana: The Japanese American Internment Experience at Camp Livingston by Hayley Johnson and Sarah Simms (review)

Harlem, Addis, and Johannesburg: African Solidarity and African American Internationalism in Harlem from the 1960s to the 1990s

Abstract This 2021 ASA Presidential Lecture combines sociopolitical history with personal reflections on Black Harlem during African decolonization. It begins at the turn of the twentieth century and traces Harlem’s transformation into an international center of pan-Africanist activism and cultural production. Brown explores solidarities that grew as Harlem politicians, grassroots leaders, and residents encountered political exiles and cultural leaders from the continent, the diaspora, and aligned political movements worldwide. These alliances and modes of protest facilitated a hardening of militant activist traditions and cultural cohesion that shaped an anti-imperialist pan-African movement and ultimately a multinational Black political movement in the 1960’s to 1990s.

Clarence Streit and Twentieth-Century American Internationalism, written by Talbot C. Imlay

Clarence Streit and Twentieth-Century American Internationalism, written by Talbot C. Imlay

Diaspora, war, Gaza

This guest editorial examines how diasporic communities influence modern wars amidst globalization and rising ethnonationalism. It discusses historical tensions between states and diasporas during conflicts, referencing world wars and recent issues involving Chinese Americans in the US. The editorial highlights the roles played by diasporas in various conflicts, including the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, scrutiny of Chinese Americans during Trump's presidency, and Irish expatriates’ involvement with the IRA. It focuses particularly on the Israel‐Gaza conflict, noting the active participation of Israeli and Palestinian diasporas in North America, often marked by internal disagreements. The piece argues that these diasporas, though physically distant from the conflicts, significantly influence global perspectives and the nature of warfare through public opinion and social media, thereby reshaping the contemporary understanding of war.

Enemies among Us: The Relocation, Internment, and Repatriation of German, Italian, and Japanese Americans during the Second World War

Enemies among Us: The Relocation, Internment, and Repatriation of German, Italian, and Japanese Americans during the Second World War

Art and the City Fiction in Japanese American Internment Camps: Sequels for Resiliency

This article delves into the creation a fictional city solely for the development of Japanese American internment camps and the way in which sustainable arts and crafts played a significant role in ensuring survival in such a hostile environment. To this aim, we searched the literature and reviewed archives, primarily from the American West Coast. We demonstrate that beyond adaptation to the circumstances, the visual representation of the new city’s settlement, founding, and daily activities, instead of adding to the typical panoptic or sombre prison imagery, remains inscribed in the images selected by the inmates, and that the use of such images precisely fostered the inmates’ resiliency. This leads us to deduce that such ’city fiction’ was necessary in this case for survival and endurance, and that its artistic representation was primarily incorporated into the State’s ideological apparatus. On the other hand, occasional fissures subtly seethed with the violence exerted in the camps. In this way, we conclude that the artistic activity itself justified the city fiction, among other situations, revealing the conditions of systemic violence and oppression faced by the internees. Within this framework, we deem that the artworks hereby generated constitute a paramount historical document for resiliency’s sake. The arguments contained herein are still relevant, because everywhere around the world, situations of exclusion and confinement of displaced immigrants, or simply those considered misfits, are repeated time and time again. Nor have we alleviated the issue in any way today, since we disregard the lessons learned from the past.

Back to the Future: Time Traveling to 1942

Abstract Japanese new media artist Masaki Fujihata's exhibition and groundbreaking accompanying public augmented reality (AR) installation “BeHere/1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration” remind us that even after eighty years, the ghost life of World War II Japanese American internment continues to haunt us. “BeHere/1942” revisits the War Relocation Authority's photographic history of the Japanese American incarceration experience using digital technology, including AR, which allows contemporary spectators to immerse themselves in the events of “relocation day” in the spring of 1942. Fujihata provides a new way of seeing, remembering, and experiencing photographs of the Japanese American wartime past in the present—empowered with contemporary media tools that are distinctly from what he calls “our own time”: AR.

International Education After the Covid Years: Recovery, Rebuilding, Reimagining - Towards a New Chinese Internationalism

Abstract This synoptic paper enquires into the status of international education after the Covid years in terms of the themes of ‘recovery, rebuilding, reimagining’. It reviews some recent adjustments to international education strategy to recapture the market for international students and looks to unesco’s new social contract for education as a barometer and index for futures of education in a very uncertain world that faces multiple crises. The paper argues that the unesco vision is a strength but must be tempered by a recognition of the shift of gravity in world economy and politics. International education took root based on the values of British and American liberal internationalism. Today it is recommended that scholars in the west also recognize the characteristics and development of Chinese internationalism that has come to inform Chinese international education.

Enemies among Us: The Relocation, Internment, and Repatriation of German, Italian, and Japanese Americans during the Second World War

Enemies among Us: The Relocation, Internment, and Repatriation of German, Italian, and Japanese Americans during the Second World War

In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

In Search of Liberty sheds new light on Black freedom struggles during the nineteenth century, locating them within an international context that testifies to the resilience of those African Americans who forged new identities for themselves far beyond the shores of the United States, whether in Africa, the Caribbean, or Europe. The eleven essays in this collection are divided into four geographical sections. The first of these, North America, opens with Franco Paz and Harvey Amani Whitfield's essay on early Black migration to Nova Scotia, viewed through the harrowing case of Elizabeth Watson, an enslaved African American woman whose search for liberty resulted, perversely, in her reenslavement. Mekala Audain tackles another neglected frontier of liberty in her illuminating essay on Black migration from Louisiana to Spanish Texas during the early nineteenth century, while Thomas Mareite explores in telling detail the risk-laden experiences of Black refugees from slavery in early independent Mexico (1821–1836).

In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World ed. by Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene, and; Beacons of Liberty: International Free Soil and the Fight for Racial Justice in Antebellum America by Elena K. Abbott

Reviewed by: In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World ed. by Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene, and; Beacons of Liberty: International Free Soil and the Fight for Racial Justice in Antebellum America by Elena K. Abbott Stephanie J. Richmond (bio) In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. Edited by Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene. ( Athens: University of George Press, 2021. Pp. 326. Cloth, $114.95; paper, $39.95.) Beacons of Liberty: International Free Soil and the Fight for Racial Justice in Antebellum America. By Elena K. Abbott. ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 304. Cloth, $89.99; paper, $29.99.) In the last decade, scholars have well documented the international history of the African American freedom struggle. Historians have chronicled the journeys of Black freedom fighters around the Atlantic world and explored how their connections shaped their activism. In two recently published books, the authors expand our understanding of how African American activists positioned themselves and the spaces they chose to inhabit in the context of their work for freedom and equality. Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene's collection of essays, In Search of Liberty, brings together scholars to weave a portrait of a vibrant and geographically diverse Black Atlantic. Organized geographically, the volume succeeds in recentering the transnational experience of Africans and African Americans as key to their freedom struggles. Elena K. Abbott, in her book Beacons of Liberty, examines one particular thread [End Page 112] of the international freedom struggle: the quest for free soil. In tracing the debates over and meanings of territories and colonies founded without slavery, Abbott brings the debate over free soil out of the American Midwest and into the larger conversation about freedom and slavery in the Atlantic. Both books fill important gaps in the historiography of the freedom struggle. In Search of Liberty is a collection of eleven essays that center internationalism in African American activism and intellectualism. Each section has particular strengths. The three essays on North America take us to the fringes of English-speaking North America, from Nova Scotia to Texas and Mexico. In particular, Thomas Mareite's essay on freedom seekers in Mexico is accessible and explains an often overlooked route on the Underground Railroad. Moving across the Atlantic to Africa, the essays in the next section spend a significant amount of time in Liberia and Sierra Leone, but Marcus Bruce's essay on missions in the Congo Free State brings a much-needed, new look at freedom struggles in post-slave-trade West Africa. The section on the Caribbean also stays close to some well-trodden ground with colonization schemes and the impact of Frederick Douglass and Haitian independence, but the three essays are solid contributions and highlight that the Caribbean was indeed international in context and in its position in African American thought. The final section, on Europe, is the one that does not hold up to the standards of the previous contributions. In particular, Pia Wiegmink's essay on African American women in Europe ignores a substantial body of scholarship on Black women's international travels. Angela F. Murphy's essay on abolitionists in Ireland is stronger but far too brief and focuses mainly on Frederick Douglass. Together, the eleven essays in the volume reveal the importance of international movement to the development of African American freedom philosophies. Elena K. Abbott's Beacons of Liberty examines the impact of free-soil havens outside the United States on the American antislavery movement. By examining the ways in which antislavery and Black newspapers reported on communities of self-emancipated and free people of African descent in Canada, the Caribbean, and West Africa, Abbott challenges the current historiography of both the Underground Railroad and abolitionism to look critically at the ways in which abolitionists and Black freedom seekers used international free soil to fight slavery in the United States. Studies of Black emigration from the United States have, to date, mainly focused on emigration to Africa or Europe. Abbott reminds us that the vast majority of African American emigrants settled just outside the United States' borders...

Enemies Among Us: The Relocation, Internment & Repatriation of German, Italian & Japanese Americans during the Second World War by John E. Schmitz

Reviewed by: Enemies Among Us: The Relocation, Internment & Repatriation of German, Italian & Japanese Americans during the Second World War by John E. Schmitz Steph Hinnershitz Enemies Among Us: The Relocation, Internment & Repatriation of German, Italian & Japanese Americans during the Second World War. By John E. Schmitz. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Pp. 386. Notes, bibliography, index.) John E. Schmitz’s Enemies Among Us: The Relocation, Internment & Repatriation of German, Italian & Japanese Americans during the Second World War is an ambitious work that sets out to expand and complicate the story of wartime detention in the United States. Using a variety of records on the forced removal of Japanese Americans, German Americans, and Italian Americans, Schmitz “examines the causes, conditions, and consequences of America’s selective relocation and internment of its own citizens and enemy aliens” (2). Schmitz argues that historians have largely focused on the “relocation and internment” of Japanese Americans and suggests that broadening this approach to include German and Italian Americans also globalizes this moment by connecting it to the repatriation of enemy aliens in exchange for American civilian internees abroad. Enemies Among Us also posits that scholars should question the argument that race fueled Japanese American internment. Schmitz provides the first full-length monograph on the policies behind and experiences of detention for all three groups while also highlighting challenges in comparing their internment. Schmitz organizes the book into nine chapters. Chapter 1 provides a useful discussion of the precedent World War I set for World War II internment, while chapters 2 through 4 explain how fears of fifth-column threats from Germans, Italians, and Japanese Americans from the late 1930s through 1940 set the stage for another round of wartime internment. Long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as Immigration and Naturalization Services, conducted investigations on potentially subversive Germans, Italians, and Japanese Americans. But, as Schmitz explains in chapter 5, Pearl Harbor appeared to validate the fears of political leaders and military officials that fifth columnists were responsible for the attack. Chapters 6 and 7 detail [End Page 408] how rumors and propaganda contributed to relocation and internment policies nationwide and on both the East and West Coasts. Chapter 8 provides a fascinating discussion of the connections between the internment and repatriation of enemy aliens in exchange for American civilian internees abroad, and chapter 9 concludes the book with a disappointingly short yet useful description of internment experiences, particularly the psychological impact of detention in the Crystal City family internment camp in Texas. Schmitz’s in-depth study is a useful and much-needed beginning for a new direction in this period of America’s wartime history: taking a broad view of detention across ethnic and racial groups. His linkage to repatriation and internment policies in the Western Hemisphere will be valuable to many scholars, but his decision to include Japanese American incarceration in his study detracts from his overall goals and undermines his argument in key places. His introduction could provide a more thorough discussion of his choice of terminology for the forced removal and imprisonment of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans (most of them second-generation, American-born Nisei) to clarify for the reader when he is discussing foreign-born Issei and Nisei. This muddies his argument that including Japanese American incarceration within the study of enemy alien internment is useful. Schmitz explains that key figures found it difficult to differentiate between loyal and disloyal Japanese Americans regardless of their citizenship status, which supports other historians’ claims that racism—while perhaps not as key for the internment of enemy aliens—was in fact a crucial factor in the unique set of circumstances faced by Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Schmitz does, however, provide food for thought in interrogating how detention and surveillance across ethnic and racial minority groups created a policy with broad implications. His work will be important for shaping future studies about wartime internment. Steph Hinnershitz National WWII Museum Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

The World in Blocs: Leo Amery, the British Empire and Regionalist Anti-internationalism, 1903–1947

AbstractA new liberal international order was born in 1918. Many rejected this regime embodied by the League of Nations and attempts to restore free trade. Among the critics were a host of European ‘regionalists’ who envisioned a world organized into federal super-states. They feared that geopolitical hegemony would soon belong to territorially contiguous super-states, such as the US and the Soviet Union. If the historiography has focused on the varieties of interwar internationalism, it has underplayed the extent of this regionalist challenge. This paper proposes to take seriously the dialectic between internationalist and regionalist visions of world order by charting the half-century political career of British imperialist and statesman Leopold Amery: from his lifelong campaign for British imperial economic union organized around preferential tariffs, through to his fervent critique of both the League and post-1945 American internationalism. Amery’s exploits demonstrate that one of the most significant revolts against the liberal international order originated not only from the revisionist powers—the USSR, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan—but also from the supposed heartland of liberal internationalism itself: the British Empire.

Look: How a Highly Influential Magazine Helped Define Mid-Twentieth Century America

Look: How a Highly Influential Magazine Helped Define Mid-Twentieth Century America

Review: Enemies among Us: The Relocation, Internment, and Repatriation of German, Italian, and Japanese Americans during the Second World War, by John E. Schmitz

As we watch in horror the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we are again faced with the question of how much responsibility individual citizens should bear for the atrocities their political leaders inflict upon other nations. We also are forced to think what should be done with the expatriates supportive of their aggressive homeland, and how the people connected to the adversarial nations through ethnic ties should be treated when they may or may not be sympathetic to their ancestral nations.John E. Schmitz’s Enemies among Us illuminates the complications posed by these questions by presenting how the U.S. government treated enemy aliens and U.S. citizens with ethnic ties with the enemies during World War II. Schmitz uses historical sources as well as personal episodes, including those of his grandparents who were incarcerated in POW camps as naturalized German Americans, to show that warring nations tend to prioritize national security concerns at the expense of individual human rights.The forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans (which Schmitz calls “relocation and evacuation”) is a prime example of the governmental abuse of its war powers. To this tragic episode of human rights violation, Schmitz adds the “internment” of German, Italian, and Japanese aliens and a smaller number of German and Italian Americans, and he tells a larger story of involuntary—and mostly wrongful—confinement of individuals whose loyalty was rendered suspicious. Schmitz’s research on the executive records, the FBI records, and the War, State, and Justice Departments’ archives reveals the comprehensive scheme of the Roosevelt Administration aiming at protecting the nation from fifth-column activities not only within the United States but in the Western Hemisphere. The earlier chapters elucidate how J. Edgar Hoover took advantage of FDR’s fear of the fifth column to transform the FBI into a formidable secret police agency. The book also offers much information on the U.S. government’s intervention into Latin American policies regarding the arrests and deportation of alleged Axis sympathizers and alien enemies.By connecting the “internment” schemes on the East and the West Coasts, this book illuminates the “internment” of Japanese nationals (Issei) in detention centers—an understudied aspect of the wartime Japanese American experiences—as a part of the larger anti-espionage federal policy. The hostage exchange scheme explains the abduction and shipment of Japanese Latin Americans along with German Axis sympathizers to the United States. Schmitz describes how the federal enemy alien policies were confusing and often shifted clumsily. In the case of the hostage exchange policy, the government had to abandon the scheme because it turned out to be more dangerous to deport subversive internees to the enemy nations than to keep them in the United States. The book illustrates the overall injustice that befell those who were labeled potentially adversarial, and the primary sources show how the U.S. enemy alien policies were poorly managed.The major problem of this book lies in its handling of the story of 110,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated in the War Relocations Centers. The book would have worked better if it had focused on the treatment of Japanese, German, and Italian enemy aliens. Schmitz carefully distinguishes the terms “internment” (detention of enemy aliens) and “relocation/evacuation” (involuntary removal of American citizens), but often his arguments become muddled throughout the book. On the latter issue, scholars in Asian American studies—such as Eiichiro Azuma (2005, 2019), Brian Masaru Hayashi (2004), Masumi Izumi (2019), and Erik K. Yamamoto, Lorraine J. Bannai, and Margaret Chon (2020)—have produced many works that explain the complex and significant roles Japanese Americans played in West Coast agriculture and in the debates related to national security and civil liberties. The book’s bibliography and many of the simplistic and faulty descriptions of the state of Japanese America before and during World War II reveal that the author was ill-prepared to explain how issues of national security, loyalty, and race intersected with one another when Japanese Americans were locked up in the inland concentration camps.

Review: Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy, by George J. Sánchez

Nearly three decades after exploring the history of Los Angeles’ Boyle Heights neighborhood through the lens of twentieth-century Mexican migration and settlement, George J. Sánchez has invited us to revisit those same streets and their residents through the lenses of world history and U.S. immigration and civil rights history writ large. The result is a coherent, sweeping, dazzling array of new understandings: of the ways Los Angeles urban policies pushed multiple marginalized groups into a shared space; of how political and economic transformations around the globe intersected in one specific place through human relationships; and of how those relationships, in turn, shaped major social movements in ways we had not previously appreciated.The first half of the book, which spans the early nineteenth century through the 1950s, recovers and recasts the neighborhood’s multi-ethnic past. Popular accounts imagine a simple story of “ethnic succession,” from a predominantly Jewish to an entirely Mexican neighborhood. Indeed, a leading historian of L.A. Jewry had earlier concluded that, “[Jewish] Boyle Heights evoked little nostalgia upon its demise.”1 Sánchez convincingly argues the opposite as he recounts the specific dynamics of warmth and tensions in relationships amongst Boyle Heights’ Jewish, Mexican, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Black residents—each in their own way refugees from violence and economic convulsion around the world. Through Sánchez’s eyes and exhaustive archival work, we come to understand Boyle Heights as a major center of Black community life; see Japanese American internment as a transformative experience in American Jewish history because it pushed Los Angeles’ Jewish residents and institutions to connect their struggle to others’; and appreciate the ways that Mexican and Jewish labor activists played formative roles in each other’s early political empowerment. Drawing on his 2004 article, Sánchez shows that the Jewish exodus from the neighborhood in the 1950s was shaped by the relentless forces of state-sponsored segregation yet was at once a site of internal community struggle about the nature of Jewish identity and its relationship to radical politics and to other neighboring communities.Sánchez’s work on the Civil Rights period and beyond revisits the highlights of Los Angeles Chicano history with an emphasis on the role of contingency and lived experience in a multi-racial city. We now see the East L.A. student walkouts of 1968 as inspired more by student leaders’ interest in the Watts Riots than Chicano nationalism. We learn, in detail for the first time, about daily life during this iconic neighborhood’s shift from majority Mexican American to majority undocumented immigrant, and how the former came to embrace the latter’s cause. And we gain a window into recent struggles over “gentefication” as college-educated Latinos faced rejection from some local activists when they returned to the neighborhood to start businesses.As an historian of the Mexican American past, I am grateful for this endlessly rich social history to inform ongoing struggles and give deeper meaning to present-day political coalitions. As the granddaughter of Beverly Millman, a Jewish American teen who moved to Boyle Heights with her parents in the early 1940s but joined her community’s “exodus” to other neighborhoods just a few years later, I am grateful for this chance to place my own family in America’s story anew. It is fitting that Sánchez, who has transformed the field of Chicano History through graduate mentorship, would now perfect its promise of offering usable pasts for both families and communities to construct more humane futures.

The American Army in Germany, 1918–1923: Success against the Odds by Dean A. Nowowiejski

Nowowiejski’s new book is, in his words, “an institutional history of the United States Army in Germany after World War I” (viii). Although the author notes that the army’s Rhineland occupation was an important precedent for its much more extensive occupation duties in various nations after World War II, he does not engage the literature written by political scientists on military government or on the military’s involvement in “stability operations” (4). This book instead employs the methods of social, administrative, and political history to draw a detailed portrait of the American army’s experience in its occupation zone centered on Coblenz from late 1918 to early 1923. Topics include the march of the Third Army into the U.S. zone in late 1918, where it largely demobilized and was replaced with new units designated as the American Forces in Germany (afg); the training, social, and recreational life of afg soldiers and officers; the administrative organization of the afg and its relations with the Germans under its jurisdiction; and the political and military activities of Maj. Gen. Henry T. Allen, who served as commander of the afg, military governor of the U.S. occupation zone, and the American representative to the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission (iarhc).Nowowiejski emphasizes that Allen, the focus of much of the book’s narrative, was “a model commander and accomplished soldier-diplomat” (9). Uncommonly for American officers, Allen had an extensive background in political–military affairs, having served as the military attaché to Russia and to Germany, the military governor of Leyte in the Philippines, and a division commander in the World War. In the American occupation zone, Allen built a highly trained and disciplined force that garnered respect from both the Allies and the Germans. With the former, he upheld American prerogatives against French encroachments on the American zone; with the latter, “he acted in the role of benevolent military governor,” defending German rights under the Versailles Treaty and protecting German property (153). Often operating without instructions from Washington, he was an effective voice for 1920s-style American internationalism in the iarhc, working against French efforts to separate the Rhineland from German sovereignty while promoting U.S. business interests and Germany’s economic recovery from the war. To a remarkable degree, Nowowiejski argues, Allen succeeded in acting “as a balancer, protecting both the French and the Germans from their own extremes” (237).Given this argument, it is surprising that Nowowiejski spends relatively little time exploring exactly how Allen and the afg perceived and interacted with German politics. To be sure, he notes that the Americans largely relied upon the existing Prussian bureaucracy to administer civil affairs in the occupation zone and “refused to recognize the people’s committees or workmen’s councils that had taken local control during the German revolution” (149). But he is silent regarding Allen’s view of the resurgence of militaristic German nationalism after the publication of the Versailles Treaty and the rise of the “stab-in-the-back” myth explaining Germany’s defeat in the war, a central idea in German politics in the early 1920s. This is a significant issue to ignore, especially since these trends in German politics had much to do with Germany’s failure to meet its treaty obligations, including an obligation to pay the United States for the cost of the afg’s occupation of its Rhineland zone.Overall, however, this book is a useful and interesting overview of the United States Army’s inaugural effort to carry out a military occupation in Europe. Deeply researched and well-written, it contains a wealth of information sure to be helpful to any student of U.S. foreign and military policy in the early 1920s, as well as to social historians interested in ordinary American soldiers of the period.

Becoming Italian

Becoming Italian

Returning the Gaze: A Visual Analysis of Jack Iwata’s Photography in Japanese American Internment Camps

This work explores photography’s potential to return the gaze and challenge powerholders within spaces of control. The authors analyzed 167 photographs from the Japanese American National Museum Jack Iwata Photo Collection to understand disciplinary mechanisms within a carceral landscape and the potential surveillance therein. The authors concluded that these historical photographs can not only supplement historical narratives of internment but also provide insight on methods of actual and potential visibility. At the same time, the authors contend that Iwata’s images are composed in ways that challenge authority.

The Political Consequences of Ethnically Targeted Incarceration: Evidence from Japanese American Internment during World War II

What are the downstream political consequences of state activity explicitly targeting an ethnic minority group? This question is well studied in the comparative context, but less is known about the effects of explicitly racist state activity in liberal democracies such as the United States. We investigate this question by looking at an important event in American history—the incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. We find that Japanese Americans who were imprisoned or had family who were imprisoned are significantly less politically engaged and that these patterns of disengagement increase with detention length. Using an identification strategy leveraging quasi-random camp assignment, we also find that camp experience matters: those who went to camps that witnessed intragroup violence or demonstrations experienced sharper declines, suggesting that group fragmentation is an important mechanism of disengagement. Taken together, our findings contribute to a growing literature documenting the demobilizing effects of ethnically targeted detention and expand our understanding of these forces within the United States.