The children of Fred Min Yasui and Gordon Hirabayashi filed an amicus brief on Tuesday that brings together the painful history of Japanese American families interned during World War and the post 9-11 era that resulted in thousands of male Muslim non-citizens from Arab and South Asian nations being held in custody.

Eric Muller, professor of law at Uni­versity of North Carolina filed the brief in the States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York in the ongoing case Turkmen v. Ashcroft. Muller’s clients are Karen Korematsu-Haigh, daughter of Fred Korematsu; Jay Hirabayashi, the son of Gordon Hirabayashi; and Holly Yasui, the daughter of Minoru Yasui.

Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi and Min Yasui challenged the constitu­tionality of the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War in separate cases that ended up before the Supreme Court.

“Their interest is in avoiding the rep­etition of a tragic episode in American history that is also, for them, painful family history,” reads the brief. “That history is not the ordeal suffered by their famous fathers and other citi­zens of Japanese ancestry, but rather that suffered by their grandparents—Japa­nese aliens in the United States at the outbreak of war in December 1941.”

The class action lawsuit was filed by Ibrahim Turkmen and Akhil Sachdeva, who were among hundreds of immi­grants detained in the months after Sept. 11, 2001, before they were cleared of links to terrorism and deported on visa violations. In June 2006, John Gleeson of States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, ruled that the government has wide latitude to detain noncitizens on the basis of race, religion or national origin.

“The executive is free to single out ‘na­tionals of a particular country’ and focus enforcement efforts on them,” Gleeson wrote. “This is, of course, an extraordinari­ly rough and overbroad sort of distinction of which, if applied to citizens, our courts would be highly suspicious.”

The suit, filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) alleges that the Muslim non-citizens from Arab and South Asian countries were presumed guilty of terrorism and subjected to physical and verbal abuse, solitary confinement and held without access to family or legal assistance.

Like the grandparents of Korematsu, Hirabayashi and Yasui, the plaintiffs are also non-citizens. The brief argues that the federal trial judge’s legal theory for dismissing the plaintiff’s complaint in Turkmen v. Ashcroft is identical to the legal theory that permitted the intern­ment of Japanese aliens during World War II.

Noting the passage of redress, the brief states that the grandchildren hope “the plaintiffs will not have to wait four decades for the justice that amici’s grandparents’ generation so belatedly received.”