Ex parte Mitsuye Endo, 323 U.S. 283 (1944), was a United States Supreme Court ex parte decision handed down on December 18, 1944, in which the Justices unanimously ruled that the U.S. government could not continue to detain a citizen who was "concededly loyal" to the United States. Although the Court did not touch on the constitutionality of the exclusion of people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, which it had found not to violate citizen rights in its Korematsu v. United States decision on the same date, the Endo ruling nonetheless led to the reopening of the West Coast to Japanese Americans after their incarceration in camps across the U.S. interior during World War II. The Court also found as part of this decision that if Congress is found to have ratified by appropriation any part of an executive agency program, the bill doing so must include a specific item referring to that portion of the program. Background The plaintiff in the case, Mitsuye Endo, had worked as a clerk for the California Department of Motor Vehicles in Sacramento prior to the war. After the attack on Pearl Harbor had soured public sentiment toward Japanese Americans, Endo and other Nisei state employees were harassed and eventually fired because of their Japanese ancestry. Civil rights attorney and then-president of the Japanese American Citizens League Saburo Kido, with the San Francisco attorney James Purcell, began a legal campaign to assist these workers, but the mass removal authorized by Executive Order 9066 in early 1942 complicated their case. Endo was selected as a test case to file a writ of habeas corpus because of her profile as an Americanized, "assimilated" Nisei. She was a practicing Christian, had never been to Japan, spoke only English and no Japanese, and had a brother in the US Army. On July 13, 1942, Purcell filed the habeas corpus petition for Endo's release from the Tule Lake concentration camp, where she and her family were being held. Judge Michael J. Roche heard Endo's case in July 1942 but did not issue a ruling until July 1943, when he denied her petition without explanation. An appeal was perfected to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in August 1943, and in April 1944, Judge William Denman sent the case to the Supreme Court, rather than issuing a ruling himself. By then, Endo had been transferred to Topaz, Utah—Tule