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By Mike Ishii
Co-Founder and Executive Director of Tsuru for Solidarity (TFS)
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Today marks the 83rd anniversary of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the removal of more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast to inland concentration camps in 1942. My mother was a child survivor of imprisonment at the hands of the federal government in a World War II U.S. concentration camp. As her son, I am extremely alarmed at what I see unfolding today.
In its first two weeks, the Trump administration announced plans to open detention sites in Texas and Colorado, and began utilizing Fort Bliss, a former Japanese American internment camp, to transport immigrants on military planes to Guantanamo Bay (GITMO). In addition to more than 200 existing detention sites across the country, ICE is now soliciting contracts for additional large concentration camps including for family detention to be run by private for-profit corporations and local law enforcement agencies. This means that children will once again be incarcerated, like my mother was. History is repeating itself.
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My mother was so traumatized from her childhood incarceration that she refused to speak about it, but Tatsuo Ryusei Inouye, in his diary, recounted his torture inside the Tule Lake Segregation Center in California, a high security concentration camp for Japanese Americans who protested their incarceration. He documented how resisters were imprisoned inside a stockade within the concentration camp where they were shackled, beaten with baseball bats, tortured and fed one spoon of rice per day.
During World War II, the government also ran extrajudicial black sites to isolate and torture Japanese Americans who resisted their detention in the larger concentration camps. At the time, even the staff running them described these places as "an un-American institution, [that] corresponds to and is premised on Gestapo methods." These sites provided the precedent for GITMO, that the government purports to exist in a law-free zone, but advocates who have been litigating about Gitmo and torture would argue that it is, in fact, within the jurisdiction of U.S. courts and international law.
The expansion of detention at GITMO establishes an emerging partnership between ICE and the Department of Defense, two agencies with countless documented harms and rights violations. GITMO itself has a history of crimes against humanity, with no oversight or outside accountability. This is a recipe for an impending human tragedy on a monumental scale. Both agencies have routinely perpetrated physical, sexual, and medical abuses and torture upon those in their custody, including children.
Guantanamo's sordid past includes top secret torture facilities, the inhumane treatment of Haitian asylum seekers fleeing political violence, a concentration camp for people with HIV, and ongoing brutalization of Muslim detainees after 9/11 who were famously waterboarded and otherwise tortured.
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It's clear that Trump is intent on paying for this cruelty by cutting funding for critical programs and services that help all Americans in order to pump money into the detention and deportation system. Whether this plan comes to fruition or not, creating fear is the point. And the message sent to immigrants and the nation is already having its impact.
As the Japanese American community prepares to commemorate the survival of the atrocities by the U.S. during World War II, we call upon our fellow Americans to demand Guantanamo Bay's immediate closure and an end to the expansion of concentration camps in the U.S.
GITMO has the potential to become the stage for some of the worst war crimes in modern history, like with all prior iterations of GITMO and the Japanese Americans mass incarceration. I know what this did to my family and community in 1942, and I am certain that I am only one of millions who will not allow this violence to go unanswered as it is inflicted on other families today.
Mike Ishii (he/him) is co-founder and executive director of Tsuru for Solidarity (TFS), an organization led by Japanese Americans dedicated to ending immigration detention. He co-chairs the New York Day of Remembrance Committee, the New York Japanese American Oral History Project, and sits on the board of the Hudson Valley Park of Study and Reflection. He also serves on the advisory boards for the Asian American Narrative Working Group, the Asian American Leaders Table, and represents TFS in the Cultivating Repair Catalyst Initiative cohort. He is a descendant of survivors of the Minidoka concentration camp.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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