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As a response to increasing anti-Japanese sentiment after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. Using national security as a justification, the order called for the relocation of persons of Japanese descent living in the United States. The newly formed War Relocation Authority moved nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans, the majority of whom were citizens, to “relocation centers”, most of which were located throughout the West.