Byron Dorgan: “The Specter amendment is about habeas corpus. That is a big term, a kind of complicated term. Let me describe it by…”

“The Specter amendment is about habeas corpus. That is a big term, a kind of complicated term. Let me describe it by describing this picture. This is a young woman. She is a young woman named Mitsuye Endo. Mitsuye Endo looked out from behind barbed-wire fences where she was incarcerated in this country some decades ago during the Second World War. Let me tell you about her. She was a 22-year-old clerical worker in California's Department of Motor Vehicles in Sacramento, CA. She had never been to Japan. She didn't speak Japanese. She had been born and raised in this country. She was a Methodist. She had a brother in the U.S. Army, unquestioned loyalty to the United States of America, but she was incarcerated--picked up, taken from her home, her job, her community, and put behind barbed-wire fences. Now, she eventually got out of that incarceration, and her plea to the courts was what really led to the unlocking of those camps, and let those tens of thousands of Japanese Americans out of those camps. They had been unjustly viewed as enemies of our country and incarcerated. And with one young woman's writ of habeas corpus, an awful chapter in our country's history soon came to an end.”