In 1942, a photograph recorded arrivals waiting through registration at the Santa Anita Assembly Center, a temporary incarceration site for Japanese Americans. Families sent to the converted racetrack were documented and assigned places to live.
This was not a voluntary queue for a public service. Under Executive Order 9066, people forced to move were processed as subjects of confinement.
Order may have reduced administrative confusion, but it did not make the system legitimate. The registration line should be understood as a coercive entrance through which people and families were converted into administrative records.