Court blasts internment of Japanese

The Supreme Court overturned its 1944 ruling backing the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II on Tuesday as it upheld President Trump's travel ban — but two of the justices said history is in danger of repeating.

While formally repudiating Korematsu v. United States, a defensive Chief Justice John Roberts said it was “wholly inapt” to compare Trump's travel ban to the court's earlier decision.

Roberts wrote that the “forcible relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of presidential authority.”

He added that “Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and — to be clear — has no place in law under the Constitution.”

But Roberts went on to reject the claim of travel ban opponents that the administration showed clear bias against Muslims with the ban, despite the President's repeated Islamophobic comments.

“We express no view on the soundness of the policy,” Roberts wrote.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, drew parallels between the travel ban and the Korematsu ruling.

“By blindly accepting the Government's misguided invitation to sanction a discriminatory policy motivated by animosity toward a disfavored group, all in the name of a superficial claim of national security, the Court redeploys the same dangerous logic,” she wrote.

Sotomayor added that while repudiating that “shameful precedent is laudable and long overdue,” it “does not make the majority's decision here acceptable or right.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has fought against Trump's ban, noted the similarities.

“Today's Supreme Court ruling repeats the mistakes of the Korematsu decision. It takes the government lawyers' flimsy national security excuse for the ban at face value, instead of taking seriously the president's own explanation for his actions,” the group said in a statement.

Fred Korematsu refused to go a government-run internment camp for Japanese-Americans in 1942. He was arrested and convicted of defying the government's order. The Supreme Court ruled against his appeal, arguing that the incarceration of an entire group of Americans based on their ethnicity was justified due to national security.