ICE’s Relocation of Minnesota Detainees Echo Korematsu Mistakes

My mother, Nancy Uchimiya, was a child interned with her mother and five siblings in 1942 at the Manzanar detention facility near Death Valley. My father’s family was interned at Poston, Ariz., while my father fought for the US in the 442nd Infantry, Company K, in France during World War II. The US government interned 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry along with my family because of who they were, not because of anything they did. Two-thirds of them were US citizens, uprooted from their Pacific-coast homes, stripped of their liberty and property, and herded into inland camps.

Then, as now in Minneapolis, our government committed a grave constitutional crime cloaked in the language of necessity. The justification for moving them was “military necessity.” The reality was racialized suspicion elevated into state policy. The camps where they ended up were as far away as Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah.

In 2026, under Operation Metro Surge, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is rounding up detainees in Minnesota—reportedly more than 3,400 so far—disproportionately targeting communities of color, funneling them through a $50-million regional logistics hub, and similarly dispersing them hundreds of miles away to detention facilities in Western Nebraska, West Texas, and the Dakotas.

Families wake up to empty beds. Lawyers arrive at jails to find their clients vanished. Communities learn, after the fact, their neighbors have been quietly disappeared into a carceral archipelago far from home.

This isn’t ordinary immigration enforcement. It is mass relocation. The structural parallels to 1942 are unmistakable. Then, the government dispensed with individualized suspicion under Executive Order 9066, replacing it with geography, ancestry, and administrative convenience.

Now, under Executive Order 14159, thousands of ICE agents surged into Minnesota, casting aside individualized due process as they rely on administrative detainers, inter-facility transfers, and broad enforcement. Then, the government claimed courts were ill-equipped to second-guess executive judgments about security. Now, ICE exploits jurisdictional distance and detention opacity to achieve the same result.

In both cases, law is bent until it breaks. And in both cases, distance does the dirty work. The Japanese internment camps were deliberately located in remote locations far from the detainees’ homes, legal networks, and communities. Geographic isolation was strategic. It severed people from their attorneys, witnesses, political allies, and anyone who might raise uncomfortable questions. Distance transformed detention into disappearance.

Today’s transfers operate on the same logic. When ICE moves detainees overnight from Minneapolis to Nebraska, Texas, or the Dakotas, the effect is identical: separation from legal representation, family support, evidence and witnesses. Detainees become legally and politically invisible. A hearing scheduled in Minnesota becomes meaningless when the respondent is in a detention facility 600 miles away. A lawyer’s ability to investigate and advocate collapses when their client is rendered functionally unreachable. This isn’t a side effect of efficient administration. It is the point.

The US Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States infamously upheld the exclusion and detention of Japanese Americans, accepting the government’s claim that emergency conditions justified extraordinary measures. The Supreme Court granted sweeping deference to executive assertions of necessity. But what history remembers are the dissents.

Justice Robert Jackson warned that the Supreme Court had validated a principle “that lies about like a loaded weapon,” ready for any authority that can plausibly claim an urgent need. Once the judiciary blesses racialized mass detention, Jackson argued, the Constitution itself becomes an accomplice. The precedent doesn’t stay confined to its moment; it metastasizes.

Justice Frank Murphy called the internment policy a “legalization of racism.” He rejected the pretense that exclusion based on ancestry could ever be squared with constitutional equality. US lawyers today should hear those warnings loud and clear.

Judicial deference to executive action presumes executive good faith. The government is entitled to reasonable discretion when it acts within constitutional bounds and operates honestly. But that deference isn’t unconditional—it can be rebutted when the government demonstrates bad faith. That is precisely what has happened in Minneapolis.

Federal Judge Patrick Schiltz, a Trump appointee, has documented 96 instances where ICE defied federal court orders in January alone, noting that this likely understates the agency’s lawlessness. He noted these serial failures “almost always [caused] significant hardship to aliens (many of whom have lawfully lived and worked in the United States for years and done absolutely nothing wrong),” including when “[t]he detention of an alien is extended, or an alien who should remain in Minnesota is flown to Texas, or an alien who has been flown to Texas is released there and told to figure out a way to get home.” Moreover, the accumulation of failures was unprecedented: “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence,” Schiltz said.

This pattern of obstruction destroys the presumption of good faith and exposes the operation for what it is: a system designed to evade legal accountability. Operation Metro Surge may not use the word “race,” but its effects speak fluently. Detainees are swept up through pretextual traffic stops. Transfers are executed without notice, often overnight, before counsel can intervene. Once moved to remote facilities, detainees’ access to attorneys, interpreters, family support, and evidence collapses.

The government insists these transfers are administrative necessities—bed space, efficiency, security. That was the language of 1942, too. “Assembly areas” and “relocation centers” created a spiderweb of prolonged detention similar to the one being created now. Euphemism is the state’s oldest anesthetic. But constitutional rights don’t dissolve at the state line or evaporate when enforcement becomes inconvenient.

The Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause applies to all persons within the US, as the Supreme Court reaffirmed in Zadvydas v. Davis. Due process isn’t a theoretical entitlement; it requires a meaningful opportunity to be heard. Shipping detainees hundreds of miles away effectively extinguishes that opportunity. A right that can’t be exercised is no right at all.

The government knows this and proceeds anyway, as in 1942. The Supreme Court finally repudiated Korematsu in Trump v. Hawaii, declaring it “gravely wrong.” But repudiation without vigilance is performative. The logic Korematsu legitimized—unchecked executive power, judicial deference, racialized suspicion disguised as security—was never fully dismantled. It simply migrated from citizens to non-citizens, from war powers to immigration powers, from camps to detention centers.

History has passed judgment on the Japanese internment camps where my mother and my parents’ families were forced to live. They are now taught as cautionary tales, not precedents. The question we face is whether we recognize the warning signs while there is still time—or whether Operation Metro Surge will be spoken of in the same hushed, regretful tones decades from now.

Justice Jackson effectively warned us that the Constitution isn’t self-executing. It survives only if we refuse to accept necessity as an excuse for injustice. If we allow this machinery of displacement to continue unchecked, we aren’t enforcing the law. We are loading the weapon once again—and pretending we don’t recognize it.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.

Author Information

Diane Uchimiya is a professor at Creighton University School of Law and is an expert in immigration law.

Michael J. Kelly is a professor at Creighton University School of Law and directs the Kaiman Center on International Criminal Justice and Holocaust Studies.

Paul E. McGreal is a professor at Creighton University School of Law and is an expert in constitutional law.

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