When America officially entered World War II on December 8, 1941, Japan, Germany, and Italy suddenly became our enemies. That posed a problem, both cognitively and legally, for the thousands of American immigrants from those countries, and even descendants of immigrants. Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February of 1942, which most famously led to the relocation of 120,000 Japanese-Americans from the West Coast to internment camps. But it also affected Italian-Americans. More than 50,000 were forcibly relocated, and 600,000 were registered and forbidden to travel outside their cities. And many had their homes and businesses seized.
One morning in spring 1942, federal officers knocked on the door of a New Haven home. The man who opened the door, Pasquale DeCicco, was a pillar of his community and had been a U.S. citizen for more than 30 years. He was taken to a federal detention center in Boston, where he was fingerprinted, photographed and held for three months. Then he was sent to another detention facility on Ellis Island.
Still with no hearing scheduled, he was moved again to an immigration facility at Fort Meade, Maryland. On July 31, he was formally declared an enemy alien of the United States. He remained at Fort Meade until December 1943, months after Italy’s surrender. He was never shown any evidence against him, nor charged with any crime.
Read more stories of how Executive Order 9066 affected Italian-Americans at Smithsonian.