The decision was determined in Executive Order 9066 issued and signed by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942.
This order authorized the Secretary of War to prescribe certain military areas as military zones, which resulted in eviction of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Their fell under the suspicion of espionage, their asserts frozen, and they were forcibly put into internment camps.
Approximately 122,000 men, women and children of Japanese ancestry were evicted, many of them American born citizens.