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By Root 800 0

no longer the nation’s primary gate for inspection, Ellis Island increasingly reverted to a role that it had played sporadically in its history: a prison for unwanted aliens. Much would change in the coming years. World War II and the Cold War would highlight the dangers that existed in the world. As Americans concerned themselves with fighting those threats abroad, they also began looking to threats on the home front. The nation’s immigration laws became increasingly entangled with national security concerns. Once again, Ellis Island would find itself at the center of controversy.

Chapter 17

Prison

I would never go back to Ellis Island. I spent too much time facing the back of the Statue of Liberty. I always felt that even though she had welcomed immigrants promising the American dream, she turned her back on us just because of our ancestry.

—Eberhard Fuhr, German enemy alien detainee

Government counsel ingeniously argued that Ellis Island is his “refuge” whence he [Mezei] is free to take leave in any direction except west. That might mean freedom, if only he were an amphibian.

—Justice Robert Jackson, Shaughnessy v. Mezei, 1953

“HERZLICH WILLKOMMEN! HEIL.” THOSE WORDS ON A large poster greeted visitors to Room 206 at Ellis Island in 1942. This was the headquarters of a small clique of pro-Nazi German nationals who had been detained by the U.S. government as enemy aliens. Even before the United States entered the war, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt was drawing up lists of suspicious aliens to be arrested and detained if and when the country joined the war effort against the Axis powers. J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation spent a great deal of time between 1939 and 1941 collecting information on noncitizens living in the United States who were suspected of sympathizing with Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. In October 1941, the attorney general warned officials at Ellis Island to prepare for an avalanche of wartime detainees.

Hoover had run into bureaucratic difficulties during the Red Scare because the power to detain and deport aliens resided in the Labor Department. Now he would have no such problem. The Immigration Service had been moved to the Justice Department in 1940. Immigration was now officially a law enforcement issue.

On December 8, 1941, as the nation was reeling from the previous day’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Major Lemuel Schofield, head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), wrote to Hoover with a list of individuals “considered for custodial detention” because of their views about Germany and Italy. This information gathering had begun before either of these countries had actually been declared enemies of the United States.

More disturbing still, Schofield’s list included “American citizens sympathetic to Germany” and “American citizens sympathetic to Italy.” In all, over four thousand individuals were under consideration for detention.

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt issued three presidential proclamations declaring nonnaturalized Japanese, Germans, and Italians living in the United States to be enemy aliens. The proclamation against Japanese civilians was issued on December 7; the other two were issued on December 8, 1941, three days before the United States was technically at war with Germany and Italy.

The government wasted little time in rounding up alleged enemy aliens. On December 8, the attorney general ordered Hoover to immediately arrest “alien enemies who are natives, citizens, denizens or subjects of Germany.” They were to be arrested and delivered to the INS for detention. Hoover’s FBI moved at lightning speed. On December 9, 1941, working off the lists it had been compiling for the past two years, FBI agents arrested and detained 497 Germans, 83 Italians, and 1,912 Japanese enemy aliens. The following day saw more than 2,200 additional arrests. Some of these individuals would be quickly released, but a month later the government was holding nearly 2,700 enemy aliens in facilities across the country.

Some of the internees