Ten cars of evacuees of Japanese ancestry are now aboard and the doors are closed. Evacuees are bound for Merced Assembly Center [Temporary Detention Center], California,

1942, printed ca. 1955–65

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the incarceration of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans. Working under the auspices of the War Relocation Authority (WRA), Lange was one of the photographers who documented the forced removals. With works such as this one, which captures the anxiety and grief of a Japanese American woman being taken to the Merced detention facility, Lange sought to expose the injustice of this policy that forced citizens to leave their homes and communities for the duration of the war. The WRA kept from public view photographs like this one that documented the adversities of the detainees.