A re-enactment in New York of Korematsu v. United States, a 1944 Supreme Court case that upheld the wartime incarceration of some 120,000 Japanese-Americans, was recently staged with a new ending that takes into account the court's decision to overrule the notorious decision last June.
The public event, held on Jan. 30 to mark the centennial of the late Japanese-American activist Fred Korematsu's birthday, drew a crowd of roughly 150 who watched lawyers and judges re-enact a case that continues to resonate amid President Donald Trump's harsh policies against Muslim immigrants and asylum-seekers on America's southern border.
Playing the role of Chief Justice John Roberts, legal analyst Albert Fox Cahn read out the June 2018 rebuke of the 1944 ruling for its support of the "morally repugnant" executive order by which Americans of Japanese ancestry — mostly those residing on the West Coast — were detained in remote U.S. camps during World War II.