Executive Order 9066 was a United States presidential executive order signed and issued during World War II by United States president Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. This order authorized the secretary of war to prescribe certain areas as military zones, clearing the way for the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the war. Notably, far more Americans of Asian descent were forcibly interned than Americans of European descent, both in total and as a share of relative population. (Those relatively few German Americans, and German and Italian citizens in the US, who were sent to internment camps during the war were sent under the provisions of Presidential Proclamation 2526 and the , part of the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798.)