When the government began drafting young men out of the camps in 1944 while their families remained imprisoned, the Fair Play Committee at Wyoming's Heart Mountain camp declared it would comply the day the Constitution was restored to them — and not before. Sixty-three Heart Mountain resisters were convicted in the largest mass trial in Wyoming history, sentenced to three years, and sent to federal prison at McNeil Island and Leavenworth; roughly three hundred Nisei from all ten camps ultimately resisted the draft on the same grounds.
Seven Fair Play Committee leaders, along with journalist James Omura, who had defended the resisters in print, were tried separately for conspiracy; the leaders' convictions were overturned on appeal in late 1945, and Omura was acquitted — one of the era's few press-freedom victories. President Truman pardoned all the Nisei draft resisters in December 1947, but the men bore the stigma of disloyalty inside the Japanese American community for decades, until the redress movement of the 1980s reframed their stand as constitutional conscience of the highest order.