Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in U.S. internment camps as children were among the activists and elected leaders who last week called for the release of kids and parents jailed at the notorious Berks County Residential Center in Pennsylvania, and who condemned the migrant family jail as “problematic at all levels, and that was before the pandemic,” Reading Eagle reports.
Reading Eagle reports that while Shut Down Berks Coalition members and others cited the novel coronavirus crisis and the facility’s chronically poor conditions in their calls for families’ releases, Japanese American activists pointed to a painful past they’re seeing mirrored at Berks. “When I think of the children today that are being held, I think of them 50 to 70 years from now," said psychotherapist Dr. Satsuki Ina, who was born in an internment camp in California. "I feel very distraught.”
As Tina Vasquez previously reported over at Prism, “Japanese survivors of internment camps and people currently being targeted for deportation have been organizing together for months, working in partnership to fight the detention and deportation of immigrants” targeted today by the Trump administration. “The parallels are unmistakable,” Vasquez continues, “going beyond the government-run internment camps and detention centers—and even beyond the targeting of specific racial and ethnic groups.”
Reading Eagle reports these activists have focused their efforts on urging Pennsylvania to shut down the facility, which is also the target of a recent lawsuit demanding families’ releases. “The state Department of Human Services in February 2016 declined to renew the center's license to house children and moved to revoke it, saying the license was not being used as it was intended,” Reading Eagle said. “The center was permitted to operate while it appealed the action. An administrative law judge said in April 2017 that the agency lacked grounds to revoke the license. The state chose to review that decision as the center continues to operate.”
What’s continued is cruelty, plain and simple. It was just days ago that Berks finally released a 7-year-old child and her dad after a horrific 250 days in detention, Philadelphia Inquirer said, reporting that “Maddie had spent more time inside than any child currently held in the country’s three family detention centers, the two others are in Texas.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials had previously offered to release Maddie, but only if her dad stayed behind. Because somehow family separation isn’t as bad as indefinite detention?
"They shouldn’t suffer a whole lifetime of consequences,” Ina said according to Reading Eagle. “The developing brain can be permanently altered by living in a state of stress such as living in a prison camp.” Hiro Nishikawa, another Japanese American survivor of U.S. internment camps, told Reading Eagle that the experience of seeing their kids detained may be even more traumatic for parents. “I realized later that my parents probably experienced PTSD,” he said.
Groups suing for the release of families from Berks and two other migrant family jails say officials continue to jail these families under added harm due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. “The families are trapped and at risk of serious irreparable physical harm,” the lawsuit states. “Their placement in family detention has created a dangerous situation that imminently threatens their lives, the lives of those in the surrounding communities, and the general public should a COVID-19 crisis spark within family detention.”
While two federal judges so far have now called on ICE officials to release migrant kids as quickly and safely as possible, far too many continue to remain in custody and at risk. “Our message is clear: We have to free our families,” Philadelphia council member Helen Gym said according to Reading Eagle. “We have to free our families because it is unjust and inhumane.”