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DENVER (KDVR) — Last Friday, Sen. Michael Bennet gave a speech on the Senate floor in favor of a bipartisan bill that highlights the shortsighted and racially motivated actions that this nation made nearly 80 years ago to the day.

Sponsored by Congressmen Ken Buck and Joe Neguse, H.R. 2497 would designate the Amache National Historic Site, also known as the Granada Relocation Center, as an official unit of the National Park System.

This would ensure that the site, opened on Aug. 27, 1942, would be entitled to federally funded protection and preservation for the benefit of present and future generations who have yet to learn of the horrific incarceration of Japanese civilians during World War II.

To receive National Historic Site classification from the Department of the Interior, the bill must pass before the department determines that a sufficient quantity of land, or interests in land, has been acquired to constitute a manageable park unit.

The only senator to object to the passing of this bipartisan bill was Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who objected on behalf of Utah Sen. Mike Lee, who was not in attendance due to “weather.” According to Cornyn, the Utah senator had an amendment to the bill he plans on proposing.

Executive Order 9066 and its fallout

Shortly after Pearl Harbor was attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted Executive Order 9066, which awarded the secretary of state at the time the right to designate certain areas within the U.S. as military zones.

The desired result of the order was to stem the fear of many American citizens who wrongfully assumed that their fellow countrymen, whose lineages connected them to Japan, were responsible for the surprise assault that left 2,403 U.S. personnel dead and a nation heading into a world war.

120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were born and raised in the U.S., were incarcerated as a result of FDR’s order.

According to the Amache Preservation Society, the incarceration center that sits one mile west of Granada hit a maximum occupancy of 7,318 people between 1942 and 1945. More than 7,000 of those detainees were of Japanese ancestry, and before the end of the war arrived, 199 births were recorded on the site.

The evergreen reminder of what fear and bigotry can cause was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 18, 1994, and was subsequently designated as a National Historic Site on Feb. 10, 2006.

Today, the APS maintains the site, in association with the Amache Historical Society, the Friends of Amache, the Japan-America Society of Southern Colorado and the University of Denver.