Dr. Satsuki Ina was born in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans in California, surrounded by guards armed with machine guns. She was later moved to another prison camp known as Crystal City, in Texas. “When we were disappeared from our homes, jobs, and classrooms,” she writes, “there was no organized protest, no marches, no petitions, only silence as Americans turned their heads as we were taken away.” More than 70 years later, she has been warning that history is repeating itself.
Ina and about 60 other internment camp survivors are planning a protest at a migrant family jail in Dilley, Texas, on March 30, where the Trump administration has detained moms and babies as young as five months old. “Other mothers report that their infants are sick or have exhibited behavioral and sleep challenges during their detention.” One immigrant rights advocacy group filed a complaint earlier this month, stating that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been illegally detaining kids at another family jail in the state for weeks on end.
RAICES said that one child detained with his dad for over 40 days at Karnes Detention Center has been traumatized. “His son ‘used to be a very active and friendly boy’ but has become ‘depressed’ and ‘feels the heaviness of this place’ in his weeks-long detention.” But rather than being released together, they were separated, the dad sent to one facility and the boy to another. Meanwhile, kids stolen under the barbaric “zero tolerance” policy continue to remain under U.S. custody, months after a federal judge’s reunification deadline.
Ina said she and others have organized this protest “to remind America that unjust mass incarceration of children and families is a tragic repetition of the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in a climate of hate and war-time hysteria. Justified in today’s immigration hysteria, we are hearing again, similar claims of ‘economic threat,’ ‘spies and terrorists,’ ‘unassimilable’ race and religion, etc., echoed in today’s rhetoric calling for bans and walls. We will not be silent.”
Shortly before their visit to Dilley, Ina and activists also planned a memorial at Crystal City, where they themselves were once imprisoned as children so long ago. The memories remain fresh, however. “With our grey hair, walkers, and hearing aids, we will speak out against criminalizing and stigmatizing our fellow human beings,” she continues. “We’re bringing our voices, our taiko drums, our family and friends, and we’re bringing thousands of paper cranes folded by Japanese Americans across the nation to let the children inside the South Texas ‘Family Residential Center’ know that we care.” RAICES has information here on how to join this protest if you are in the area.
