Department of the Interior Press Release Regarding the Release of Japanese Aliens from Tule Lake Segregation Center

1 ADVANCE RELEASE ADVANCE RELEASE Tozier - Int. 2838 OWI - 3375 DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR TRUMAR ADVANCE RELEASE: Cleared and Issued NATIONAL AND For Sunday Papers, RECORDS Through Facilities of the July 9, 1944 to Office of War Information Transfer of 26 Japanese aliens over the last three months from the Tule Lake Segregation Center in northern California to enemy alien internment camps under jurisdiction of the Department of Justice was announced today by Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes. The aliens, Secretary Ickes explained, are men who were arrested for playing an active part in the disturbance of last November at the segregation center and who have been confined since their arrest in a fenced-off stockade at the center. Under agreement between the Department of Justice and the War Relocation Authority, they have been moved to internment camps during the last three months in comparatively small groups. All aliens have now been removed from the stockade area at Tule Lake, the Secretary said, although a group of 25 United States citizens of Japanese ancestry, who are not eligible for transfer to internment camps, still remains. After the disturbance of November 4, both during and after the period when the Army was temporarily in control of the segregation center, a total of 111 aliens and 229 citizens, suspected of complicity in the outbreak, were removed from the residence area of the center and confined in the stockade. The War Relocation Authority established a fact-finding committee, composed of administrative employes at Tule Lake, to review the cases of these persons and to make recommendations to the project director. Aliens whose records made them eligible for internment were gradually .transferred to Justice Department camps. Citizens who had records as chronic troublemakers were retained in the stockade. Those individuals -- both citizen and alien -- whose behavior in the stockade indicated they would not make further trouble were returned, after periods of con- finement ranging from two to eight months, to the residence area of the Tule Lake Center. Originally, Secretary Ickes pointed out, the War Relocation Authority had con- templated transferring citizen troublemakers from the stockade to its isolation center at Leupp, Ariz., but because of the small number of citizens left in the stockade after re-examination of the cases it was determined not to re-open the special center in Arizona. END OF ADVANCE RELEASE: For SUNDAY Papers, July 9, 1944. # # #