Following the conclusion of World War II, the camps began to close, with Tule Lake the last to close in March of 1946. The WRA provided internees with minimal resettlement assistance -- $25 and a train ticket. Some internees returned to the West Coast while others settled in the states where they had been interned.
They began to rebuild the lives they had enjoyed prior to 1942, while facing continuing prejudice. The camps were gradually disassembled, with most buildings demolished or moved. It is easy to identify barracks moved from Topaz to Delta, Utah, where they now serve as residential buildings. Camp land reverted to the federal agency that had previously owned it or was sold. Not long after the end of the war, the physical manifestations of the camps were not much more than archeological remains.
As the era of the camps came to a close, “no person of Japanese ancestry was ever convicted of any serious act of espionage or sabotage during the War.” (Confinement and Ethnicity, page 25). A final chapter to the internment story was added in the late 1980s when, in response to a decade of lobbying, Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which bestowed a formal apology and paid $20,000 to each of the surviving internees.
-National Trust for Historic Preservation
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