Editors’ Note: This piece contains descriptions of gun violence, police brutality and incarceration. The term “Nikkei” is used interchangeably with Japanese American and people of Japanese American descent living in the U.S.
Eighty-four years ago, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the mass incarceration “of all persons deemed a threat to national security.” Among these “threats” were my grandparents — Edith and Itsuji Sasaki.
They were part of the 120,000 Japanese Americans living in the Western U.S. who were forced into a series of internment camps by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), regardless of citizenship status or any material threat. Mass systemic attacks on marginalized communities like this, especially toward immigrants in the U.S., are nothing new. But the Trump administration’s escalating assault on immigrants draws concerning parallels to Japanese internment.
Six months ago, the Trump administration opened Camp East Montana in Fort Bliss, a detention center on top of the former site of an internment camp. The camp, which formerly caged dozens of Nikkei immigrants, now holds thousands of people in one of the largest immigration detention centers in the U.S.
It’s not just the camps.
It was the FBI who surveilled Nikkei communities over a decade before World War II. It was the federal agents and police departments who raided homes without warrants and opened their cell doors for processing. It was the U.S. Army that manned these camps with guards and armed them with rifles.
The same FBI that built watchlists of Japanese American community leaders is now doing the same for anti-ICE and pro-Palestinian activists. It’s the same federal agents who abduct community members without warrants and throw them into jail cells owned by the same police departments. It’s the same Fort Bliss that denies basic hygiene, facilities and medical care to people.
It’s the same government that shot and killed Toshio Kobata and Hirota Isomura as they were being escorted to the New Mexico Internment Center, that shot Keith Porter Jr., Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.
The brutality communities of color face today under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) isn’t an unforeseen anomaly, but a continuous legacy of militarized police violence against immigrant communities. The DHS is a continuation of the WRA, slave catchers and colonial militias that built the modern police state.
The WRA is now the DHS. What was an “enemy alien” is now an “illegal alien.”
What national security was then is national security today.
Japanese internment did not stop once the camps closed, when families resettled and the reparations checks were cashed. America’s massive complex of police, soldiers and prisons that made the abduction of an entire diaspora possible still exist today. We must understand Japanese internment as a cyclical pattern within America’s history of violent, systemic racism, not just an attack on our community.
We can’t stop at the camp official who wrote “Henry” because they couldn’t bother to spell out my Grandpa Itsuji’s name.
We can’t stop at how Grandma Edith, Grandpa Itsuji and Great Uncle Bobby spent their childhoods behind the barbed wire of Stockton, Rohwer and Tule Lake.
It has not ended.
This Februrary and beyond, when we observe the 84th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, we should do more than mourn the crimes against our community. As Japanese Americans, we cannot sit on the sidelines.
Out of respect for the struggles of our ancestors and for the people living through this now, we must answer calls for the struggle against ICE, militarized police violence and racism that allow these systemic abuses of human dignity.
This is not the time to close ranks and find ways to distance ourselves from other communities of color.
We must take this collective trauma — this rage and grief — and mobilize it into action that helps people here and now.
