After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, more than 600,000 Italian Americans and Italian immigrants found themselves caught in a xenophobic dragnet that involved mass surveillance, unprecedented harassment and, in some cases, secret internment.

After years of isolationism, America was suddenly thrust into World War II, and at the time, the federal government felt it needed to neutralize what proved to be an imaginary threat. President Franklin D. Roosevelt deemed many of our ancestors as “enemy aliens,” and hundreds of thousands of Japanese and German immigrants were also targeted.