WASHINGTON — President Bush signed into law a $38 million grant program to preserve notorious internment camps where Japanese-Americans were kept behind barbed wire during World War II.

The money will be administered by the National Park Service to restore and pay for research at 10 camps. The law is intended to help preserve the camps as reminders of how the United States turned on some of its citizens in a time of fear.

The Topaz Museum Board in Utah is planning to apply for money to help build a museum and educational center about 15 miles from the Topaz site in Delta. Private funding will be required, in addition to the grant money, to complete that project.

The museum board owns about 614 of the 640 acres that comprised the internment camp from 1942 to 1945.

"We know it's going to be a statewide effort to make this a facility the whole nation will learn from," Jane Beckwith, president of the museum's board told the Deseret Morning News when Congress approved the grant two weeks ago. Beckwith hopes to break ground on the project in 2008.

The camps housed more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans — U.S. citizens and residents — under an executive order signed by President Roosevelt in 1942, when America was reeling from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941.

At the time, there were fears that Japanese-Americans were loyal to Japan. Roosevelt's order prohibited them from living on the West Coast, in a position possibly to help an invasion force.

Thousands of families in California and parts of Washington state, Oregon and Arizona were pushed from their homes and into camps surrounded by armed guards. The sites named in the legislation are in California, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Idaho. The last of the camps closed in 1946.

President Reagan signed a presidential apology to Japanese-Americans in 1988.

Co-sponsors of the bill included the two current members of Congress who spent time in the camps as children: Democratic Reps. Mike Honda and Doris Matsui of California. Matsui was born in the Poston camp in Arizona.

The National Park Service already operates facilities at two of the 10 camps: the Manzanar National Historic Site in California and the Minidoka Internment National Monument in Idaho.

The law will give grants to nonfederal organizations for historical research and restoration work at the sites named in the legislation, as well others selected by the head of the Interior Department, which includes the National Park Service.

The board is in the first phase of its application to become a privately held National Historic Landmark.