Proclamation 2527 on December 8

arrest and take into “custody”

Ah yes, yes I see the consequences today in San Francisco and I sense if I may be so bold the Federal precedent alongside the legislation behind New York’s Emergency laws. States are dangerous at the best of times and these are not the best of times. The law is command backed by force. And force application varies from place to place. Once upon a time Italians and Japanese. No doubt this Thanksgiving season victims from the thrice great mutated Bird Flu collapse and turn blue and this will be caught on film and used to justify the instant state of emergency. Except a close look by YouTube skeptics I forsee will show 70’s clothing, hair, cars, furniture and police and military uniforms. The exact drama will not be found. The tapes were destroyed in a warehouse fire on Maui will be the Disney explanation.

The FBI, backed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s issuance of Proclamation 2527 on December 8, continued to arrest and take into “custody” (a broad term that could mean being held in long-term internment centers for enemy aliens, extended detention, and/or arrest and later release) Italian immigrants who were classified as enemy aliens (some who had existing files with the Department of Justice because of political activities or group associations declared dangerous by the FBI) and displayed some behavior that could be considered suspicious, subversive, and designed to undermine America’s safety and defense. 

FBI agents confiscated property (including radios, weapons, and other materials that could lend themselves to conspiring against the United States) and arrested thousands of Italian immigrants—including Joe DiMaggio’s mother who lived in San Francisco, and famed NYC-based opera star Ezio Pinza. DiMaggio was able to coordinate his mother’s release and Pinza secured the help of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in requesting legal assistance. Others like Molinari and Berizzi, however, were not so lucky.

The wartime story of removal and detainment tends to focus on Japanese Americans forced from their homes along the West Coast in early 1942 and held in camps, but more than 600,000 Italian Americans experienced some form of restrictions placed on them because of their enemy alien status. Not all 600,000 were detained in internment camps (418 Italian immigrants were held in internment centers) as this number includes Italian American communities along the West Coast who were subject to curfews and often unfounded searches and seizures. 

Still, the Department of Justice’s efforts to arrest foreign-born Italians with personal and familial ties to their homeland is an example of wartime fear and suspicion that greatly increased the surveillance powers of the federal government during World War II and resulted in hardship for Italian American families.

The story of Italian internment begins years before Pearl Harbor. Italians began to arrive in the United States in larger numbers beginning in the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century because of political upheaval in their homeland and a demand for labor in America. By 1940, approximately 1,623,580 Italians had settled from coast to coast, in northern and southern communities, earning a living as manual laborers, shop owners, and fishermen. 

San Francisco, New York, and Philadelphia were cities with large Italian American communities, but southern cities like New Orleans also witnessed a growing Italian American population through the early twentieth century. Prejudice and discrimination against working-class Italians were pervasive and the ethnic stereotypes of Italians as inherent criminals were widespread, but many Italians naturalized and their children became part of a broad, multi-ethnic New Deal coalition that supported President Roosevelt and his economic, social, and political programs during the 1930s. By the 1940s, Italian Americans—such as Fiorello LaGuardia—had secured political positions of power, but the rise of Benito Mussolini in Italy gave pause to the Department of Justice, the FBI, and President Roosevelt.

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/proclamation-2527-internment-italian-americans

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