Case Decided: December 18, 1944 In Korematsu v. United States (1944), the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 vote, upheld the government’s forceful removal of 120,000 people of Japanese descent, 70,000 of them U.S. citizens, from their homes on the West Coast to internment camps in remote areas of western and midwestern states during World War II. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii in December 1941 prompted anti-Japanese sentiment across the country and fears that Japanese Americans on the West Coast were still loyal to Japan. In response to these fears, President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the War Department to remove persons of Japanese ancestry from their homes and confine them to internment camps. American-born Fred Korematsu refused to leave his home in California. He tried to avoid capture and relocation, but when he was eventually caught, he challenged his conviction, arguing that internment was a violation of his constitutional rights. In the Court’s 6-3 decision, Justice Hugo Black acknowledged that racial discrimination is “immediately suspect” but said that interning Japanese Americans was within the war powers of Congress and the president. Fred Korematsu’s conviction was eventually overturned in 1983, and in 1998, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton.