bitter after months of living with a curfew, unannounced barracks searches, and restrictions that put a stop to recreational activities and most employment in camp. In the spring of 1944, Ernest Besig of the Northern California branch of the ACLU became aware of a hastily constructed stockade at Tule Lake, in which internees were routinely being brutalized and held for months without due process. Besig was forbidden by the national ACLU to intervene on behalf of the stockade prisoners or even to visit the Tule Lake camp without prior written approval from the ACLU's Roger Baldwin. Unable to help directly, Besig turned to civil rights attorney Wayne M. Collins for assistance. Collins, using the threat of habeas corpus suits, managed to have the stockade closed down. A year later, after learning that the stockade had been reestablished, he returned to the camp and had it closed down for good. On July 1, the Renunciation Act of 1944, drafted by Attorney General Francis Biddle, was passed into law; U.S. citizens could, during time of war, renounce their citizenship without first leaving the country—and once they did, the government could treat them as enemy aliens, and detain or deport them with impunity. Angry at the abuses of their U.S. citizenship and convinced there was nothing left for them in the country of their birth, or coerced either by WRA authorities and pro-Japan groups in camp, a total of 5,589 Nisei and Kibei internees chose to renounce their citizenship. Ninety-eight percent of those who renounced their citizenship were inmates at Tule Lake, where conditions had been so harsh. During 1945 after the war's end, the other nine WRA camps were closed as Japanese Americans gradually returned to their home towns or settled elsewhere. Tule Lake was operated to hold those who had renounced their citizenship and Issei who had requested repatriation to Japan. Most no longer wished to leave the United States (and many had never truly wanted to leave in the first place). Those who wanted to stay in the United States and regain their citizenship (if they had it), were confined in Tule Lake until hearings at which their cases would be heard and fates determined. After the last cases were decided, the camp closed in March 1946. Although these Japanese Americans were released from camp and allowed to stay in the U.S., Nisei and Kibei who had renounced their citizenship