The Department of Health and Human Services has confirmed that the site of a former internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II will not be reused—for now at least—to jail as many as 1,400 migrant children, with the announcement coming just days after hundreds of activists returned to Oklahoma’s Fort Sill to protest the Trump administration’s inhumane plan.
“Over the last several weeks HHS has experienced a decrease in Department of Homeland Security referrals of unaccompanied alien children,” an agency spokesperson said, referencing human children. “Additionally, HHS has been placing UAC with sponsors at a historically high rate. As such, the UAC Program does not have an immediate need to place children in facilities.”
An interesting statement regarding “a historically high” sponsorship rate, considering it wasn’t that long ago that the administration was purposefully scaring away potential sponsors by sweeping up hundreds who had stepped forward to take in a child but also lacked legal status. Whatever the reason, the activists who had vocally protested at Fort Sill—including indigenous leaders, Dreamers, and Japanese American elders—celebrated the victory.
“Dream Action Oklahoma, which helped organize a rally and march of an estimated 400 people to Fort Sill last weekend to protest plans to use the base, said they were pleased by the announcement,” the AP reported. “’The organizing coalition is continuing the resistance of child imprisonment in Oklahoma,’ the group said in a statement.”
However, the administration also made clear the base could still be reopened in the future as a prison camp, should numbers of vulnerable children coming to the U.S. again rise. But children belong with their families in freedom, not in deplorable facilities and prison camps, and we must keep heeding the advice of those who have already survived this kind of mass imprisonment on U.S. soil.
“Seventy-five years ago, 120,000 of us were removed from our homes and forcefully incarcerated in prison camps across the country,” Dr. Satsuki Ina, a WWII internment camp survivor, said during a June protest at which some activists were ridiculed by a military police officer (he was later suspended and is now under investigation). “We are here today to protest the repetition of history.” We must keep protesting.