On August 10, 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 into law, granting Japanese-Americans reparations for their time spent in internment camps during World War II.

Japanese-American internment was the forced removal and internment of approximately 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans, most of whom were United States citizens, from the West Coast of the United States during World War II. President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the internment with Executive Order 9066 in 1942. This allowed local military commanders to designate military areas as “exclusion zones,” from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” This power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire Pacific coast, including all of California and most of Oregon and Washington. Around 10,000 of these people were able to relocate to other parts of the country of their own choosing. But the remainder, roughly 110,000 people, were sent to hastily constructed camps called “War Relocation Centers” in remote areas of the nation.

Some compensation for property losses was paid in 1948, but most internees were unable to fully recover their losses. On August 10, 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government, and established that reparations of around $20,000 would be paid to internees beginning in 1990. California Congressman Norman Mineta, who was an internee as a child, sponsored the Act.