In February 1942, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, the document that cleared the way for the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. This film from the Timeline history strand traces how families in Los Angeles, Seattle, and other coastal cities were given days to sell homes and businesses before being sent to assembly centers and then to camps like Manzanar. Interviews with historians and, where available, survivors and their descendants sit alongside period photographs, newsreel footage, and government propaganda that framed the incarceration as a wartime necessity. The film lays out the legal and political mechanics behind the order, including the military's claims of security risk and the absence of any evidence of espionage among those interned. It follows the story through the camps themselves, the loyalty questionnaires that split families, and the long postwar silence many survivors kept about what happened to them. The first part of a two-part series, it builds a plain, document-led account of a policy the U.S. government later formally apologized for.