My grandfather was incarcerated in remote detention camps with 120,000 Japanese Americans without due process for years for no reason other than his race. Rachel Maddow created a podcast series called “Burn Order” about this period during World War II.
In 1942, when they took the Japanese Americans to the remote incarceration camps by train, the shades were pulled down when they passed through cities… this reminds me of a recent video of a photographer who with his telephoto lens took videos of immigrants abducted by ICE being loaded into planes in a far wing of an airport, shielded from the everyday travelers.
Japanese Americans had to sell everything in their homes in a few days, to be taken to processing centers like Tanforan in California, a race track where they had to fill mattresses with straw that still smelled of horse manure… this reminds me of the warehouses where ICE is holding immigrants these days. Former ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons wanted to see a deportation process like “Amazon Prime but for human beings.” These industrial warehouses that ICE is rapidly buying with $45 billion appropriated last year are not capable of handling ventilation or sanitation needs of mass incarceration.
In the remote detention camps where my grandfather was housed, families of 5-6 lived in 20’ x 20’ rooms in uninsulated, single-wall construction barracks in the desert where there were severe sandstorms… that reminds me of the terrible overcrowding in current detention centers, where people are stored like boxes, where 47 people have died since Donald Trump took office.
In America, there currently are 73,000 in detention; 73% who do not have criminal records. Over 90% of detainees are held in facilities run by private prison corporations, such as GEO Group and CoreCivic that are owned by Trump’s billionaire allies who helped get him elected.
Among the only people who stood up for the Japanese Americans in World War II were the Quakers. It is different now. Today, we all are here to witness and work to stop this terrible injustice that will be as much or more of a scar on American history as what happened to my grandfather.
I always wondered why my late mother-in-law and life-long social justice activist Rohna Shoul visited both Hiroshima and Dachau… but I realize now what a model she was to me…she did not look away.
We cannot look away. We cannot look away as the government plans to build 16 smaller facilities to house 1,000 people and six larger ones to house 10,000 people.
Andrea Pitzer, authority on concentration camps, writes about the “warehousing of humans… and why it is necessary for everyone to move against it as quickly as possible.” She compares the scale of the network of planned facilities to the “largest concentration camp systems in history — the Soviet Gulag, the Nazi concentration camps, and Chinese labor camps in the People’s Republic of China.”
Pitzer says that the “Trump administration is not taking these actions for border enforcement purposes. The mission has crossed over into explicit ethnic cleansing to entrench political power.” She defines the term “concentration camp” as mass civilian detention without due process based on ethnicity, race, gender, religion or political affiliation.”
We must start to spread awareness about this rapid expansion. We need to shut down these facilities. People in New Hampshire and various red states have stopped the sale of warehouses to ICE. The Detention Watch Network has developed a Communities Not Cages Campaign to address this situation. Project Salt Box, a group that supplies research to DWN, publishes the ICE Warehouse Purchase Tracker.
This Saturday, April 25, DWN is sponsoring a National Day of Action to Stop ICE Warehouse Detention. Indivisible North Quabbin will host a rally at South Main Street and Water Street in Orange and Indivisible Northampton-SLWM will host one in Hadley (see Mobilize.org for information).
We can’t look away — no matter how ugly things look around us, collectively we can act together to make a difference. For the sake of the next generations, we mustn’t sit on the sidelines as our democracy is chipped away. For the last 50 years, Japanese Americans have said “never again” when we commemorate the injustice that started on February 19, 1942, the day that President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. Sadly, that “never again” is happening now.
My father and uncles served in the U.S. military while my grandfather was held behind barbed wire for years. They served to save our democracy. Now it is our turn.
Ruth Suyenaga lives in Royalston.