The camp at Tuna Canyon opened on December 16, 1941 — nine days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and before most Americans had fully processed what had happened. The Department of Justice had converted a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp, constructed in 1933 in the Tujunga hills above the San Fernando Valley, into a temporary detention facility. The first arrivals came from various Southern California towns and cities. They had been designated enemy aliens by the U.S. government. Most were Japanese Americans, but German and Italian immigrants were also detained here, as were Japanese Peruvians — men brought from South America and imprisoned without charge in the hills above Los Angeles.
Tuna Canyon had a stated capacity of 300 people, and through its nearly two years of operation from December 1941 to October 1943, over 2,000 people passed through it. The facility served as a processing point: detainees were held here temporarily before being transferred to longer-term Department of Justice facilities like Fort Missoula in Montana, Fort Lincoln in North Dakota, or the internment camp at Santa Fe, New Mexico. The people detained were not combatants. They were, in the main, longtime residents — community leaders, businesspeople, fishermen, farmers — whose presence was deemed a security risk by a government operating under emergency authority and wartime fear.
The site was used as a probation school for juvenile offenders after the war ended. In 1960, it was sold and converted into the Verdugo Hills Golf Course. The physical traces of the detention station — the buildings, the fences, the ground where people were held — now lie in the southeastern section of the golf course, beneath the driving range and overflow parking. A housing developer called Snowball West Investments attempted to build on the land and filed a lawsuit contesting its historic designation. In 2013, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously declared a grove of trees at the site a Historic-Cultural Monument.
What Tuna Canyon represents is a story common to many sites of wartime incarceration: the landscape was altered, the buildings removed, and for decades the history of what happened there went largely unmarked. The Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition has worked to document and memorialize the site, preserving oral histories and photographs — including an aerial photograph taken by the camp's officer in charge, M.H. Scott, that shows the layout of the facility from above. That aerial perspective, taken by the administration of the camp itself, now serves as evidence of what was done here. The Verdugo Hills Golf Course operates today above a place where more than two thousand people were imprisoned without trial.
Located at 34.25°N, 118.283°W in the Verdugo Hills above Tujunga, California. The Verdugo Hills Golf Course occupies the site; the detention station lay in the southeastern portion of the property. The hills are visible on the northeast side of the San Fernando Valley. Bob Hope Airport (KBUR) lies approximately 6 miles to the southwest. Mountain terrain rises steeply — maintain adequate altitude when flying in this area.