Title: "W.R.A. Director Defends Tule Lake Administration," Seattle Times, 1/22/1944, (ddr-densho-56-1014)
Densho ID: ddr-densho-56-1014

W.R.A. Director Defends Tule Lake Administration

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 22.--(AP)--Declaring that many influential people and organizations are trying to reduce Americans of Japanese descent" to the status of second-class citizens," Dillon S. Myer, director of the War Relocation Authority, has defended his administration of the Tule Lake Japanese relocation center.

Such persons and organizations are jeopardizing the prisoner-exchange system between Japan and the United States, he told a Town Hall meeting yesterday.

"They are doing a great disservice to the national war effort and providing the enemy with propaganda material," Myer asserted.

He declared that mass confinement of the Japanese in this country "would be blow to the constitutional safeguards which now protest every one of us against arbitrary government action."