In memory of her recent death, a blog has had various articles on her case:
The litigant who really scared the military and the Justice Department, though, was a young Japanese American woman named Mitsuye Endo. At the time of the exclusion and incarceration of Japanese Americans, Endo was a twenty-two-year-old clerical worker in California's Department of Motor Vehicles in Sacramento. She had never been to Japan, spoke no Japanese, had been born and raised a Methodist, had a brother in the U.S. Army, and was of unquestioned loyalty to the United States. On July 12, 1942, while she sat behind the barbed wire of the "assembly center" at the Tanforan Racetrack south of San Francisco, an attorney filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in federal district court on her behalf. ...
Indeed, it was their fear of a catastrophic loss in Endo (and not, for many of them, any strong sense of justice) that led them to press FDR to end the mass exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Fearing he would lose California's electoral votes, FDR would not announce the end of the exclusion before the 1944 election. But he did permit the military to make that announcement in December 1944, just before the Court ruled in Endo that the War Relocation Authority lacked the legal authority to continue to detain loyal Japanese Americans.* By announcing the end of exclusion moments before the Court's decision, the government hoped to drain Endo of its significance.
Here the government was successful. Endo has been forgotten, eclipsed by the more famous Hirabayashi and Korematsu cases. Forgotten, too, has been Mitsuye Endo, and this seems to be how she wanted it. Unlike the litigants in the three well-known cases, Endo avoided the limelight. She moved to the Chicago area after the war, married (taking the last name Tsutsumi), had children, worked, and lived a quiet life.
Check out the blog discussion -- interesting all around, not just as a means of comparison to current practice. That sort of thing can be overused ... but the journey can be useful on its own merits. Well, I find it to be.
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* Two justices concurring, not going along with avoiding the question. As noted in the discussion, the courts etc. can protect liberty in the long run without directly attacking a problem. Still, a forthright look at the problem (see the opinions of Scalia and Souter in Hamdi) is useful too. As to Endo, Justice Roberts was most firm in not going along with the majority's avoidance:
With respect to the executive, it is said that none of the executive orders in question specifically referred to detention and the court should not imply any authorization of it. This seems to me to ignore patent facts. ... In the light of the knowledge Congress had as to the details of the programme, I think the court is unjustified in straining to conclude that Congress did not mean to ratify what was being done. ...
An admittedly loyal citizen has been deprived of her liberty for a period of years. Under the Constitution she should be free to come and go as she pleases. Instead, her liberty of motion and other innocent activities have been prohibited and conditioned. She should be discharged.