FDR's secret prisoner exchange program and America's only family internment camp during World War II
From 1942 to 1945, secret government trains regularly delivered civilians from the United States and Latin America to Crystal City, a small desert town at the southern tip of Texas. The trains carried Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants and their American-born children to a family internment camp, the only one during World War II. Crystal City was the center of a government exchange program. During the war, hundreds of prisoners, including their children, were exchanged for ostensibly more important Americans---diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, physicians, and missionaries that were behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany.
