Trump immigration raids remind Rep. Mark Takano of WWII Japanese detentions

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Rep. Mark Takano said he returned home last Fourth of July to stories from Southern California residents about immigration patrols sweeping through communities, and that the accounts echoed a chapter of U.S. history in which his family was detained during World War II. Takano, whose American-born parents were both incarcerated as young children during the forced relocation of Japanese Americans, said he could not help drawing parallels between those events and current immigration raids.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Takano said he heard constituents describe how immigration enforcement made everyday proof of legal presence feel suddenly urgent. He said one constituent told him about beginning to carry a passport as documentation of the right to be in the country.

Takano said his family’s experience began with being labeled as a threat to national security. “I do feel like there’s a similarity of circumstance of my own 2-year-old father and my 1-year-old mother being labeled as enemy aliens and they’re considered a danger to national security,” he said.

He also compared the logic he said drove both eras of enforcement. “They’re put into these incarceration camps,” Takano said, adding that he has heard similar arguments in the present. “Similar arguments have been made by this administration — that immigrants pose a grave danger to our country and it’s for the security of our country that we’re doing this,” he said.

The AP report described the moment around Trump’s immigration push as an inflection point, with supporters and critics alike focused on what the promised scale of deportations is looking like on the ground. It also said the White House changed leadership at the Department of Homeland Security as the administration reframed its approach, with new Secretary Markwayne Mullin saying he aimed to keep the department off the front pages.

Takano, a Democrat who is the ranking member on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, used his family history as he challenged what he described as today’s approach to immigration detention and deportation. He said the country’s later redress for Japanese Americans who were detained made the comparison sharper for him, and he framed the issue as a test of whether lawmakers protect constitutional rights.

The congressman said he grew up in Southern California after learning family stories from his parents. He said his grandfather, Isao Takano, came to the United States from Hiroshima and married Kazue Takahashi, a U.S.-born citizen; the couple, he said, settled in Bellevue, Washington, and ran a business in Seattle growing tomatoes, strawberries and chrysanthemums. When the U.S. entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Takano said they were among about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, immigrants and people born in the U.S., who were forcibly relocated.

Takano said his father, William, was 2 years old when his family was sent in 1942 to the incarceration camp at Tule Lake in California, and that his mother, Nancy Tsugiye Sakamoto, was a year old when she was relocated to the detention facility in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. He said that, as in the past, people now are being swept up in anti-immigrant detentions.

The AP report said Takano has also used a reference to a modern immigration detention facility in Florida when speaking on the House floor. He said, “Will Americans generations from now visit Alligator Alcatraz and think to themselves, How could our government do this?” and he added, “These future generations of Americans will look to us, the Congress, to see what we did to try to stop it.”

Takano pointed to the Civil Liberties Act that Congress passed in 1988 as a precedent for how the country later acknowledged the harm done during World War II. He said the law sought to apologize for the “grave injustice” that had been done and provide $20,000 to each person detained, and he said Republican President Ronald Reagan signed it into law. Takano said his parents received a letter of apology from the federal government and a payment.

He said talks are under way among some in Congress for similar redress for people affected by today’s immigration enforcement operations, including those he said have had their homes raided and their livelihoods upended. “Remarkably the country did come to realize the mistake,” Takano said. “I believe we’re living through one of those eras of mistakes and I believe we can come out of this moment stronger.”