Ben Rhodes

government locked up Japanese Americans for years, regardless of their citizenship, on the theory that their race alone made them dangerous and justified putting them in what were, effectively, concentration camps, even though they weren't called that.

Well, now today, Japanese-American groups and experts on Japanese-American incarceration during World War II, they've been filing friend-of-the-court briefs in this Supreme Court case ahead of the oral arguments in the birthright citizenship case this week.

Law professor Eric Muller of the University of North Carolina is a nationally recognized expert on what happened to Japanese Americans during the war.

He has written four books on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

He has submitted a friend of the court brief in which he explains, sort of patiently,

that even in World War II, even when we were so panicked about the loyalties and the allegiances of whole huge swaths of our population, so much so that we effectively created a concentration camp system to lock up an entire ethnic group for years on the basis of how scared we were about their supposed loyalties and allegiances.

Even then, even when

citizens of Japan, who we had locked up in those camps, had babies here inside those camps.

Even then, there was no controversy at all about the fact that those babies, born in American concentration camps to citizens of another country, those babies born here were definitely American.

Even beyond that, even when people had renounced their American citizenship during World War II,

And as people who had renounced their citizenship, we had them locked up in prison camps here.

If those people who renounced their citizenship had babies here while they were in prison here, there was no question, no controversy at all that their babies born here in prison were Americans by virtue of the fact that they were born here.

And as Professor Mueller points out to the court in this friend of the court brief, even beyond that, it gets even worse and weirder.

Because in World War II, the United States went so far as to go out into the world to grab a whole bunch of people who had no ties to the United States of America whatsoever.

We were at war with Japan.

Japan had lots of American prisoners of war.

And the United States went to Latin America and seized people of Japanese descent from Peru.

It forced these people to come to the United States to be put in prison here so that these people could potentially be used in prisoner swaps with Japan.

These people had no connection to the United States of America.

They were Peruvians of Japanese descent.