Trump has previously said he would require Muslims to register in a database, though a spokesman said this week that Trump would not seek “any registry or system that tracks individuals based on their religion.” The spokesman added that Trump would announce other policies to vet foreign visitors from “high terrorism” countries.

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If the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II creates some kind of precedent for the treatment of Muslims in the United States today, it’s worth remembering exactly what that history looks like. That's something a stunning series of historical photographs from the Library of Congress, now housed at a Yale University site, makes easy to do.

After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, a sense of paranoia spread about the loyalty of people of Japanese ancestry living in the United States. By February 1942, that suspicion culminated in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's signing of an executive order that led to the incarceration of many Japanese Americans for the duration of the war.

More than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them U.S. citizens, were forced into internment camps during the war. Those with ancestors from Korea and Taiwan, which were Japanese colonies, were also interned, as well as some with German and Italian heritage.

As they were shipped off to the camps, many Japanese Americans lost their businesses, livelihoods and savings. Because many were only allowed to take what they could carry to the camps, business owners were forced to shutter their shops and sell off their stock for cents on the dollar. In the 1942 photograph below, the departing owners of a shop in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo left a message saying, “God be with you till we meet again.” Families also rushed to sell their homes, furniture and other belongings.

At the time, many Japanese Americans in the West worked as farmers, such as the onion farmer below. Before evacuation, they were forced to sell their unharvested crops and equipment at steep losses, often to the material benefit of white farmers in their area.

Under the watch of the U.S. military, Japanese Americans boarded trains that would take them to internment camps. In the following photographs, people wait for trains that would take them from Los Angeles to the Owens Valley camp, more than 200 miles to the north.

In the photograph below, Japanese Americans arrive by car at a “reception center” in Santa Anita, Calif., a former racetrack that was surrounded by barbed wire.

Conditions in the camps were harsh. Most were located in desolate places, such as deserts or swamps. Some were set up on old racetracks and fairgrounds, others on Native American reservations. Their occupants lived in flimsy, cramped and hastily erected shelters, often without plumbing, electricity or privacy. Food was limited, and there were outbreaks of dysentery. Some who tried to leave their camps were shot.

In the camp below, in Nyssa, Ore., Japanese Americans lived in tents without electricity. As photographer Russell Lee wrote in the photograph's original caption, the occupants were accustomed to better living conditions.

The photograph below shows a family in their tent home in the Nyssa camp. As Lee wrote in the original caption: “One of the sons of this family is in the U.S. Army. Two of the sons were studying engineering at an American university before the evacuation and are now greatly worried about possibilities of continuing their education.”

Lee also documented people in the Nyssa camp enjoying the few entertainments that they had — playing a gramophone record in the shared “recreation tent,” playing baseball, swimming, or reading and writing letters.

But time in the camps was spent laboring in the fields. As young men around the country went to war, local farms turned to incarcerated Japanese Americans as a valuable source of labor. Here are Japanese Americans sowing the fields in the Tule Lake Relocation Center in Newell, Calif., in 1942:

Here are other farmworkers in a camp in Twin Falls County, Idaho:

Internment ended by 1946, but the suffering of many Japanese Americans did not. Many left the camps almost penniless, set back a generation or more in terms of wealth, and returned to their communities to confront violence and racism.

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It wasn't until the 1970s that a U.S. president, Gerald Ford, would denounce internment. In 1980, the U.S. government issued a report saying the policy was caused by “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” The U.S. government ultimately paid out more than $1.6 billion in reparations to those who were interned.