Trump, FDR and executive orders

Feb. 19 marked the 75th anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066, which initiated the forced relocation and internment of more than 100,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, a majority of whom were U.S. citizens, simply because they were deemed a threat to the country following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour.

In doing so, FDR stripped an entire group of American citizens of their most basic constitutional rights.

Today, Democrats in the United States (and many Canadians for that matter) continue to vilify the current U.S. president for his attempt to ban entry to persons from certain majority-Muslim countries. They would be wise to pause and consider that the man long hailed by historians and common folk alike as of one the greatest presidents used his executive powers, in the name of national security, to effectively imprison persons for no other reason than their ethnicity — many decades before Donald Trump ever took his seat in the Oval Office. Ian B. Copnick, Côte-St-Luc