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EK: Could you talk a little bit about your responsibilities within the office?

TC: There were multiple roles as legal counsel for the office, and it varied depending on the times. I did research in a number of areas: there was outreach to the public; there was a lot of litigation; there was legislation; and then there was drafting the regulations. And one of the first legal challenges to the redress program was a lawsuit from Arthur Jacobs versus the Attorney General Barr claiming that the Civil Liberties Act was unconstitutional because it did not compensate Italian and German ancestries for those who were interned. And so he filed the lawsuit, and Arthur Jacobs was the American-born son of a German alien who was interned at Crystal City in Texas. Crystal City was the INS family camp. So when the aliens were interned, it was generally the male, and then that was the one camp where they could bring their spouse or children. So he sued, the lower court threw it out saying he did not have standing. He appealed, and the District Appellate court found that he did not have a valid claim, that the act was constitutional, that the Commission report, Personal Justice Denied, clearly showed how persons of, Americans of Japanese ancestry were discriminated against in the war, and that there was a basis not to pay the Germans and Italian aliens. And the court also found that the numbers of the German and Italian internees were so much smaller, and that generally they would have due process rights. And most of them were released, it was only a very small number who were interned. So the court upheld the constitutionality of the act and said, yes, there was discrimination against those of Japanese ancestry.

EK: What might a typical day have looked like for you, and did that change over the course of the program?

TC: Well... oh, it did change over the program, but I guess one other early aspect to the program is that we had worked on the 1992 amendments to the Civil Liberties Act, and one of the major portions of the amendments was to include non-Japanese spouses and parents to be eligible, because they had a terrible choice. They either had to accept internment or be separated from their families. And so there was pressure from the communities and also within the Justice Department to ask Congress to amend the Act to make them eligible. So that was a key point in the early part of the program, to have it amended to include the non-Japanese spouses as eligible. It was also key because we realized there would be more potentially eligible claimants than Congress initially envisioned. So those '92 amendments increased the appropriations to $1.65 billion from $1.25. It also established there would be judicial review in the federal claims court for appeals. And there was also pressure to make the redress payments exempt from federal taxes, and so that was included in it. They also included a six-month period for ORA shutdown, and finally that amendment added a benefit of the doubt standard, which gave the ORA more latitude in order to make favorable determinations.

So that was another part of my duties, and I guess one of the primary parts of my duties was research, and as part of the research efforts, they realized there were some cases that required extensive historical research or had very unusual circumstances. So they established a new office, a sub-office called Special Verification Unit. So I was in charge of that unit, and initially, the records were fairly clear for the internees and the persons who evacuated [based on] the government action. But then it was also hard to meet one of the requirements of the Act, permanent residency status.

[Interruption]

TC: So as I was saying, a Special Verification Unit was set up to help conduct extensive research into certain areas or unusual circumstances. One of those was to meet one of the eligibility requirements-- the permanent residency status or U.S. citizenship. And many of these aliens had their immigration status back from the 1910s, '20s, '30s, so we had to work closely with the Immigration and Naturalization Service to determine if they had immigration status during the time of this. And INS was very cooperative, and they would obtain some of their files that were forty-five years old for us to review. But in addition to eligibility, we were also required to research the statutory heirs. That under the Act, if the potential claimant was deceased, there were three classes of heirs who could inherit. One was the spouse, and if the spouse was deceased, it would go to the children. If the children were deceased, it went to the parents. And so, in those kind of instances, we would have to go to the particular state and look at the state law to see if it was a valid marriage, if it was a valid divorce, or remarriage or adoption. For instance, I remember one case where the claimant was deceased and the wife claimed the proceeds. And she said she was married, but there were no marriage certificates, and she said it was a common law marriage. And in the state they lived in, it did not accept common law marriage, but where they lived before, it did, and they were there for a significant period of time. So we found that, yes, it was a valid marriage. We also had to research other countries' laws, and we found that in Japan particularly, they would adopt adults in order to carry on the family name. So we would have to go back and obtain documents showing it was a valid adoption in order to prove they were a correct heir. So that was a big part of our group, too.

The other thing we did was handle litigation, there was probably about thirty cases where the ORA was sued because individuals had been found ineligible. We also drafted regulations. In addition to the 1992 amendments, there were two cases where groups were found eligible. One of them were the minor children who relocated to Japan, and that was one of the lawsuits that I'll talk about shortly. Another group were the children who were born after their parents' evacuation or internment, and they were made eligible. So we amended the regulations to include those as eligible.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.