Tule Lake in northern California was one of the most important surviving sites of the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans and became the most contentious of the ten major camps created after Executive Order 9066. Opened in 1942, it was later turned into a maximum-security segregation center for prisoners labeled disloyal or disruptive through a deeply resented loyalty questionnaire. Overcrowding, poor conditions, protest, martial law, and detention without due process marked life there. Tule Lake also became central to wartime citizenship renunciations, deportation cases, draft resistance, and later legal efforts to restore rights, making it a stark record of civil rights abuses and redress.