Tule Lake Segregation Center

About this property

The Tule Lake War Relocation Center, also known as the Tule Lake Segregation Center, was an American concentration camp located in Modoc and Siskiyou counties in California and constructed in 1942 by the United States government to incarcerate Japanese Americans, forcibly removing them from their homes on the West Coast of the United States. They totaled nearly 120,000 people, more than two-thirds of whom were United States citizens. Among the inmates, the notation "Tsurureiko (鶴嶺湖)" was sometimes applied. After a period of use as the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, this facility was renamed the Tule Lake Segregation Center in 1943 and used as a maximum-security segregation camp to separate and hold those prisoners considered disloyal or disruptive to the operations of other camps. Inmates from other camps were sent here to segregate them from the general population. Draft resisters and others who protested the injustices of the camps, including by their answers on the loyalty questionnaire, were sent here. At its peak, Tule Lake Segregation Center was the largest, with 18,700 incarcerated people, of the ten camps and the most controversial. 29,840 people were imprisoned over four years. After the war, it became a holding area for Japanese Americans slated for deportation or expatriation to Japan, including some who had renounced US citizenship under duress. Many joined a class action suit because of civil rights abuses; many gained the chance to stay in the United States through court hearings, but did not regain their citizenship due to opposition by the Department of Justice. The camp closed March 20, 1946, seven months after the end of the war. Twenty years later, members of the class action suit gained restoration of US citizenship through court rulings. California later designated the Tule Lake camp site as a California Historical Landmark and in 2006, it was named a National Historic Landmark. In December 2008, the Tule Lake Unit was designated by President George W. Bush as one of nine sites—the only one in the contiguous 48 states—to be part of the new World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument, marking areas of major events during the war. In addition to remains of the concentration camp, the national monument unit includes Camp Tulelake, also used during the war; as well as the rock formation known as the Peninsula/Castle Rock. The John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act, signed March 12, 2019, split up the three units of the monument, creating a new Tule Lake National Monument. In 2026, the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed the location on their annual "America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places" due to a lack of protection on the majority of land and a proposed construction project.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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