The Tule Lake War Relocation Center was constructed in 1942 by the United States government as an American concentration camp located in Modoc and Siskiyou counties in California. It was established to incarcerate Japanese Americans who had been forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast of the United States, totaling nearly 120,000 people, more than two-thirds of whom were United States citizens.
After initial operation as the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, the facility was renamed the Tule Lake Segregation Center in 1943 and converted into a maximum-security segregation camp. Its purpose shifted to separate and hold prisoners considered disloyal or disruptive to the operations of other camps. Inmates from other camps were transferred to Tule Lake to segregate them from the general population. Draft resisters and others who protested the injustices of the camps, including through their answers on the loyalty questionnaire, were sent to this facility. At its peak, the Tule Lake Segregation Center held 18,700 incarcerated people and was the largest of the ten camps and the most controversial.
Over the course of its operation, 29,840 people were imprisoned at Tule Lake. The facility remained a significant and contentious part of the Japanese American incarceration program, representing the government's use of segregation and maximum-security measures to manage those deemed problematic within the internment camp system.
Multiple deaths from illness and one guard killing; mass protests suppressed by tank deployment
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