{"id":1833,"slug":"tule-lake-segregation-center-newell-california","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["Tule Lake Segregation Center is the camp inside the camp — the maximum-security facility the government created in 1943 to hold the 'disloyal,' defined by a loyalty questionnaire whose two questions asked the impossible. Question 27 asked draft-age men if they'd serve in combat; Question 28 asked everyone to swear unqualified allegiance and 'foreswear' the Japanese emperor — for the Issei, who were barred from citizenship, a demand to become nationless. At Tule Lake, forty-two percent refused or answered no.","The segregation made it the hardest camp in the system. Eighteen thousand people crowded in; 'loyal' Tuleans were supposed to leave and four thousand refused to move again; the November 1943 protests brought martial law, tanks at the gate, and a stockade that held men for months without charges. Tule Lake was the last camp to close, in March 1946, and it produced the renunciants — the five thousand Nisei who, under the pressure of the camp, gave up their American citizenship, a decision most fought for decades to undo.","The file keeps the Segregation Center: the questionnaire, the no-no boys, the stockade, and the camp where the government's own process manufactured the disloyalty it claimed to contain.","Tule Lake is the archive's segregation file — the loyalty test, the stockade, and the citizenship the camp pressured people to renounce."]},{"heading":"Why this file matters","paragraphs":["Tule Lake Segregation Center is the archive's segregation file — the questionnaire, the martial law, and the renunciants the camp produced.","A camp built for 'disloyals' keeps its stockade — the file's suggestion being that Tule Lake's hold is the mechanism: the form that made the answer impossible, and the camp that punished the answer it forced."]}],"name":"Tule Lake Segregation Center","aliases":["Tule Lake War Relocation Center"],"type":"INCARCERATION_SITE","type_label":"Incarceration Site","cats":["DARK_HISTORY"],"groups":["dark-history","institutions"],"desc":"Preserved portions of the largest WRA incarceration camp.","full_desc":"An incarceration site in Newell, California, opened in 1942, Tule Lake Segregation Center is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Preserved portions of the largest WRA incarceration camp. The archive files it under dark history. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — a documented spine with no haunting reports attached. Access is restricted, and the file says so plainly.","address":null,"city":"Newell","county":null,"state":"California","postal":null,"region":"West","lat":41.888731,"lon":-121.360249,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"HISTORIC_SITE","access":"RESTRICTED","access_notes":"NPS describes ranger tours; confirm arrangements. Nearby Peninsula/Castle Rock is closed to public access.","ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":1942,"year_closed":1946,"year_demolished":null,"designation":"National Historic Landmark","current_use":null,"research_notes":"Segregation center at Newell distinguished from separate Camp Tulelake. No conflation with Tule Lake lake or wildlife refuge.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"MEDIUM","score":65,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0.8,"source_quality":1,"paranormal_claim_provenance":null,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0.7,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[],"history":[{"description":"Operated May 27, 1942–March 20, 1946. The original jail, stockade and maintenance areas remain within the historic site. The site's documented history is the record the rest of the file stands on. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. 'Tule Lake' documents the entry. It anchors the timeline the rest of the file hangs from.","evidence":"HISTORICALLY_VERIFIED","date_start":null,"date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"Tule Lake","url":"https://www.nps.gov/places/crtulelake.htm","publisher":"National Park Service","type":"GOVERNMENT","authority":1}}],"legends":[],"entities":[],"events":[{"name":"Tule Lake opens","type":"INCARCERATION","date_start":"1942-05-27","date_end":null,"description":"Tule Lake began receiving incarcerees on May 27, 1942, and within a year became the most notorious of the ten WRA camps — converted into a maximum-security segregation center for those the government branded 'disloyal.' Stockades, tanks and over a thousand military police eventually guarded nearly 19,000 people behind its fences, the largest population of any camp.","evidence":"INCARCERATION","source":{"name":"Tule Lake","url":"https://www.nps.gov/places/crtulelake.htm","publisher":"National Park Service","type":"GOVERNMENT","authority":1}},{"name":"Tule Lake closes","type":"INSTITUTION_CLOSURE","date_start":"1946-03-20","date_end":null,"description":"Tule Lake shut its gates on March 20, 1946 — the last of the ten incarceration camps to close, months after the war ended. Thousands held there had renounced their citizenship under pressure, and the camp's surviving stockade and jail remain the starkest surviving architecture of the entire program — preserved today as part of a National Monument.","evidence":"INSTITUTION_CLOSURE","source":{"name":"Tule Lake","url":"https://www.nps.gov/places/crtulelake.htm","publisher":"National Park Service","type":"GOVERNMENT","authority":1}}],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Access is restricted; check with the managing agency or landowner before visiting; check nps.gov for current hours and alerts.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"Tule Lake","url":"https://www.nps.gov/places/crtulelake.htm","publisher":"National Park Service","type":"GOVERNMENT","authority":1}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":{"title":"Tule Lake War Relocation Center","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tule_Lake_War_Relocation_Center","desc":"National Monument of the United States in California","extract":"The Tule Lake War Relocation Center, also known as the Tule Lake Segregation Center, was an American concentration camp located in Modoc and Siskiyou counties in California and constructed in 1942 by the United States government to incarcerate Japanese Americans, forcibly removing them from their homes on the West Coast of the United States. They totaled nearly 120,000 people, more than two-thirds of whom were United States citizens. Among the inmates, the roughly phonetic Japanese notation \"Tsurureiko (鶴嶺湖)\" was sometimes used in referring to the camp.","img":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4a/Tule_Lake_War_Relocation_Center.jpg/330px-Tule_Lake_War_Relocation_Center.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=api&utm_content=thumbnail","score":68,"lat":41.88944444,"lon":-121.37472222},"counts":{"claims":0,"history":1,"legends":0,"entities":0,"sources":1}}