In Travel Ban Ruling, High Court Repudiates Notorious Japanese Internment Case

In the sharply divided decision over President Trump’s travel ban, the Supreme Court repudiated a notorious case from the last century: one that justified the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed to what she called “stark parallels” between the 1944 Korematsu decision and Tuesday’s ruling, which upheld Trump administration restrictions on would-be visitors from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Somalia and Yemen.

In both cases, “the Government invoked an ill-defined national-security threat to justify an exclusionary policy of sweeping proportion,” Sotomayor wrote in a dissent joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “As here, the exclusion order was rooted in dangerous stereotypes about … a particular group’s supposed inability to assimilate and desire to harm the United States.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote for the majority in the travel ban case, dismissed the comparison. While the forcible relocation of Japanese-American citizens to concentration camps was “objectively unlawful” and “morally repugnant,” Roberts argued, “it is wholly inapt to liken that” to the travel ban, which he described as a “facially neutral policy denying certain foreign nationals the privilege of admission.”

Even as he rejected the parallels to the travel ban, though, Roberts took the opportunity to expressly disavow the high court’s 74-year-old decision.

“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,’ ” Roberts wrote, quoting from Justice Robert Jackson’s 1944 dissent.

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