Amache, Colorado's Japanese American Internment Camp

Half a mile west of the small town of Granada, in the flat shortgrass prairie of southeastern Colorado, is the site of one of the more devastating chapters in American constitutional history. This is Amache, officially the Granada War Relocation Center, one of ten camps where the United States government imprisoned more than one hundred ten thousand Japanese Americans during World War Two.

The camp opened in August of nineteen forty-two, nine months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, under Executive Order Nine-Oh-Six-Six. Over the course of its operation, more than ten thousand people passed through Amache, roughly two-thirds of them American citizens. They had been removed from their homes, farms, and businesses on the West Coast, given days to settle their affairs, and transported here to southeastern Colorado, where barracks rose from raw prairie and summer temperatures reached into triple digits while winter temperatures plunged below zero.

At its peak in February of nineteen forty-three, the population reached seven thousand three hundred eighteen, making Amache at that moment the tenth largest population center in Colorado. The inmates ran their own newspaper, operated a school system, built gardens, and created social organizations. The camp's silk-screen shop produced thousands of posters for the American military and became the largest such program in the country.

Perhaps the sharpest contradiction of Amache was this: four hundred forty-one young men from the camp volunteered or were drafted to fight for the country that had imprisoned their families. Many served in the Four Hundred Forty-Second Regimental Combat Team, which became the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in the history of the United States Army.

The camp closed in the fall of nineteen forty-five. The site sat neglected for decades, preserved largely by local high school students in Granada who maintained it as a field project. After President Biden signed the Amache National Historic Site Act in March of twenty twenty-two, Amache was formally established as the Amache National Historic Site in February of twenty twenty-four, the newest unit in the National Park System, a permanent acknowledgment of what was done here and who endured it.