The U.S. government detained and deported 25-year-old Brian Jose Morales Garcia to Mexico in April. That doesn't sound like breaking news in 2026, except Garcia was born in Denver.

Garcia told The Texas Tribune that he explained to police and immigration agents that he was a U.S. citizen and that he had a copy of his birth certificate and his Social Security card at his home in Austin, Texas. It didn't matter; he was shipped to Mexico.

Garcia's name may not long be remembered, but the government's disregard for individual rights and contempt for human rights will not soon be forgotten.

Some would like to pretend, or maybe don't know, that this conduct is not unprecedented. There was a time in this country when the government incarcerated thousands and thousands of American citizens who were not accused of a crime with the imprimatur of the highest court in the land.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan on Dec. 7, 1941, former President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the U.S. military to remove over 120,000 people of Japanese descent, the majority of whom were American citizens, from their homes and force them into American prison camps throughout the United States.

After Pearl Harbor, Japanese American Fred Korematsu tried to join the military and was turned away because of his ancestry. He was later fired from his job for the same reason.

Korematsu was arrested for failing to evacuate to a prison camp. He was convicted and Korematsu and his family were interned in Topaz, Utah, where the government had set up one of 10 prison camps.

Korematsu appealed his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court found "That there were members of the group who retained loyalties to Japan has been confirmed by investigations made subsequent to the exclusion. Approximately five thousand American citizens of Japanese ancestry refused to swear unqualified allegiance to the United States and to renounce allegiance to the Japanese Emperor and several thousand evacuees requested repatriation to Japan."

As a result, in December 1944, the high court ruled 6 to 3 against Korematsu, declaring that the incarceration was not caused by racism — it was justified as a "military necessity."

Justice Robert Jackson, who would later prosecute war criminals in Nuremberg, Germany, complained about the lack of any evidence to justify the incarceration, writing: "the Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination ... The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need."

It turns out that Justice Jackson was right. It wasn't just that the government didn't have evidence; the evidence that was presented was knowingly false and misleading. The real evidence was hidden from Korematsu, his lawyers and the Supreme Court.

According to the Fred T. Korematsu Institute, as the Department of Justice began searching for evidence to support the Army's claims that Japanese Americans were a threat, they "found precisely the opposite — that J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, the FCC, the Office of Naval Intelligence and other authoritative intelligence agencies categorically denied that Japanese Americans had committed any wrongdoing. These official reports were never presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, having been intentionally suppressed."

Ultimately, after nearly 50 years, Korematsu's conviction was overturned based on the misconduct of the government's attorneys. In a statement as important today as it was in 1942, Korematsu told the court after his conviction was overturned, "According to the Supreme Court decision regarding my case, being an American citizen was not enough. They say you have to look like one ... I thought that this decision was wrong and I still feel that way. As long as my record stands in federal court, any American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without a trial or a hearing."

The Korematsu decision was the law of the land for 64 years. The decision was generally considered one of the worst decisions in American history. The decision was formally overturned in 2018.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book, "The Executioner's Toll," 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

Photo credit: Molly Hutson at Unsplash