Missouri state representative Mike Moon called for a special legislative session to halt refugee resettlement and “stop the potential Islamization of Missouri.” In his letter to the state speaker of the house, Moon feared that the diversity of Islam’s adherents could be a potent weapon.

I do realize that the refugees we should be scrutinizing most is one who professes the muslim faith. Unless I’m mistaken, a practicing muslim can do whatever is necessary for the "good” of the faith — telling “fibs” is a smallpart [sic] of what they might do. And, from what I’ve seen, a practicing muslim comes in all flavors (black, white, brown, yellow — American, African, European, etc. etc.). A “white” lie could allow an individual to pass through the vetting process.

In Rhode Island, State Senator Elaine Morgan wrote to a constituent, “I do not want our governor bringing in any Syrian refugees. I think our country is under attack. I think this is a major plan by these countries to spread out their people to attack all non Muslim persons.” She added, “If we need to take these people in we should set up [a] refugee camp to keep them segregated from our [populace].”

In Louisiana, Senator David Vitter, who appears likely to lose that state’s gubernatorial election on Saturday, intensified his rhetoric against Syrian refugees as election day draws near. Vitter tweeted on Tuesday, “Spoke w/ LA State Police. They don’t know where BR [Baton Rouge] Syrian refugee is except that he was headed to DC & no gov agency is in contact with him.” Catholic Charities of Baton Rouge, a religious nonprofit that helps refugees resettle and adjust to their new communities, denied that they lost track of the refugee in question. Later that afternoon, the charity began receiving death threats for its work.

And in Virginia, Roanoke Mayor David Bowers suspended local assistance for Syrian refugees and invoked mass internment as a response to the perceived threat. “I’m reminded that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from Isis now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then,” he said in a statement.

Bowers refers to the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. In early 1942, President Roosevelt and the U.S. military issued exclusion orders to expel 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast and detained them in internment camps for most of the war. About 70,000 of those interned were American citizens. Those sent to the camps lost their homes, businesses, and many of their personal possessions, keeping only what they could carry with them.

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Ansel Adams’s Subversive Images of Japanese Internment

In one of its most widely condemned decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the exclusion orders in Korematsu v. United States. Justice Hugo Black argued for a 6-3 majority that the exclusion orders were a necessary outgrowth of the president’s war powers and justified by the situation at hand. “Compulsory exclusion of large groups of citizens from their homes, except under circumstances of direst emergency and peril, is inconsistent with our basic governmental institutions," he wrote in his opinion for the Court. “But when, under conditions of modern warfare, our shores are threatened by hostile forces, the power to protect must be commensurate with the threatened danger.”