Revisiting America’s Dark History of Internment

 

“The objective of this contract is to obtain all infrastructure, including temporary housing structures, physical plant, staffing, resources, services, and supplies necessary to house aliens in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in a safe and secure environment to effectuate their removal from the United States,” the 80-page document on ICE’s new staging facility at Fort Bliss, Texas, starts out. 

But the vanilla bureaucratic language can’t hide the stark reminders of one of the worst episodes in our nation’s history, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Instead of being treated like the cautionary tale it should be, Fort Bliss is on the way to becoming another stain on our nation.

During World War II, Americans were held at Fort Bliss in an uncomfortably small compound behind a double barbed wire fence overseen by guard towers. Internment is an ugly word. It refers to the confinement of people due to suspicions, based on nothing other than Japanese origin or ancestry, that they were a security threat after the attack on Pearl Harbor. They were never charged with a crime. They were not brought to trial and given an opportunity to defend themselves. They were incarcerated without due process.

The National World War II Museum in New Orleans explains that when the attack on Pearl Harbor happened, “about 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry lived on the US mainland, mostly along the Pacific Coast. About two thirds were full citizens, born and raised in the United States. Following the Pearl Harbor attack, however, a wave of anti-Japanese suspicion and fear led the Roosevelt administration to adopt a drastic policy toward these residents, alien and citizen alike.” Virtually all Japanese Americans were forced out of their homes and incarcerated in concentration camps for the duration of the war.

The military had already arrested people it believed posed a risk. It was the public that was concerned about Japanese Americans. Two journalists fueled that fever. Walter Lippmann, a national columnist, fearmongered, warning people that “the only reason Japanese Americans had not yet been caught plotting an act of sabotage was that they were waiting to strike when it would be most effective.” Columnist Westbrook Pegler wrote that “The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.” They swayed public opinion. Internment was the result.

Unsure, at first, of how to proceed, our government created makeshift camps with horrific conditions. One was at Santa Anita Park, a racetrack in Southern California, where entire families were forced to stay in horse stalls with dirt floors. Fort Bliss was one of the first facilities used to house people, with over 100 individuals held there. 

Ultimately, more than 125,000 people were forcibly removed from their homes, and people whom our government interned lost approximately $400 million in property. Reparations paid in later years did not come close to fully compensating people for their lost homes, businesses, and community, let alone the deprivation of rights they suffered.

Now, Donald Trump is doing it again. The Department of Homeland Security has constructed a large tent facility on the base at Fort Bliss for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), making it the largest immigration detention site in the nation. People who do not learn history’s lessons are doomed to repeat them.

Ann Burroughs, president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles said that “The use of national security rhetoric to justify mass incarceration today echoes the same logic that led to their [Japanese Americans] forced removal and incarceration.” She continued, “It is inconceivable that the United States is once again building concentration camps, denying the lessons learned 80 years ago.”

Inconceivable is a word I have returned to again and again in these past few years.

In an effort to brush off criticism, the Department of Homeland Security released a statement claiming that “Comparisons of illegal alien detention centers to internment camps used during World War II are deranged and lazy … The facts are ICE is targeting the worst of the worst—including murderers, MS-13 gang members, pedophiles, and rapists.” 

Except we know that isn’t true. ICE is targeting students, parents, day laborers and other people who are easy to find, rather than making good on claims that violent people are being removed from American streets. 

In July, government data confirmed that the majority of people currently detained by ICE have no criminal convictions, and among those who do, only a few have convictions for the kinds of crime the Trump administration claims. 

An independent, nonpartisan data research organization reported that the numbers are even worse: roughly 70% of the estimated 59,380 people held in ICE detention as of August 10 have no criminal conviction.

In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of internment in a case called Korematsu v. United States. That case has never been overturned, although in a case during the first Trump administration involving his Muslim ban, Chief Justice John Roberts called it “gravely wrong the day it was decided,” and said it should have “no place in law under the Constitution.”

It cost roughly $1.2 billion to build the new facility at Fort Bliss. That’s our taxpayer dollars at work—to hold 1,000 people. In addition to being morally bankrupt, it’s hardly a cost-effective way to conduct deportations. The ACLU reports that the people being held in the tent facilities at Fort Bliss face soaring summer heat and inadequate access to medical care and legal counsel. All of it is being done in our names.

ICE wants to conduct its Fort Bliss facility without any public scrutiny. The “Performance Work Statement” we started with makes that clear: “There shall be no public disclosure regarding this contract made by the contractor (or any subcontractors) without review and approval of such disclosure by the ICE Office of Public Affairs. 

The government considers such information privileged or confidential. The contractor shall notify the COR when a member of the U.S. Congress or any media outlet requests information or makes a request to visit the facility. The contractor shall coordinate all public information related issues with the CO. All press statements and releases shall be cleared, in advance, with the ICE Office of Public Affairs.”

In other words, they want to make sure we don’t protest this facility. That we don’t demand accountability for it from our elected officials. That the kind of lawsuits that shut down Donald Trump’s “Alligator Alcatraz” don’t materialize here. We know what to do. In moments like these, the threads between politics, law, and history matter more than ever. Understanding how they fit together helps you make sense of what’s really happening. 

We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance