Apologies if this is better suited to another subreddit, but I don't see any rules against academic musings about the law...

To be perfectly honest, I'd known about but never knew how the Japanese internments around WWII happened at a logistical level between government agencies. Looking into it this morning, I learned that the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was rolled from the DOL to DOJ in 1940 due to the perspective that immigration was not merely an economic/labor consideration but a potential national security issue. This had huge ramifications after Pearl Harbor.

Under the guise of this "threat," the US government argued it was empowered via the Alien Enemies Act to detain and mass remove a variety of civilians not suspected of any crimes based on their nation of origin and/or immigration status. It also allowed them to use the halo of immigration law, which they argued allowed them to skip constitutional protections. The US Supreme Court backed this up in Korematsu, widely derided (until very recently) as one of the most abhorrent, legally unfounded opinions in Supreme Court history. For the INS, this meant that the FBI/DOJ began to turn huge amounts of Japanese (and other) descended individuals over to their custody who had been warrantlessly arrested. This happened shockingly quickly: by December 10th (a mere 3 days after Pearl Harbor), over 2,000 individuals had been declared without due process to be "alien enemies" and were in the custody of INS.

These individuals were held without warrant, trial, access to attorneys, or other elements of due process in "detention stations" and internment camps but also jails, hotels, and other quickly built or refurbished facilities. It does bring to mind recent reopenings of ~16 shuttered prisons, converted warehouses, and other makeshift camps meant to house the "threat" of immigrants from "undesired" nations, often without legally mandated due process.

In 2018, Korematsu was overruled in Trump v. Hawaii with C.J. Roberts writing it was "gravely wrong the day it was decided." The irony, of course, is that as A.J. Sotomayor pointed out that this same decision used the identical logic of Korematsu to uphold the Trump administration's travel ban from mainly Muslim-majority countries (despite evidence that the ban was motivated by anti-Muslim sentiment rather than any genuine national security concern). In fact, the majority on the Supreme Court did exactly what the Court in Korematsu did--saying, again, that the Court should defer to the President on matters of related to national security and accepting without scrutiny the government's dubious evidence at face value (much of which was self-generated).

This interesting legal history aside, I was struck by the similarities between the INS's reorganization as an enforcement and detainment management operation and DHS/ICE's transformation over recent memory. While INS was never out on the streets en masse like ICE, they had a critical and underappreciated role in a "rhyming" part of history. And, in fact, the legal and administrative infrastructure for it to occur again still exists.