WASHINGTON — The congressman returned home last Fourth of July to startling stories in Southern California as immigration patrols swept through communities, and one constituent told him about starting to carry a passport as proof of the right to be in the country.
Rep. Mark Takano, whose American-born parents were both incarcerated as young children with their families during the forced relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II, could not help but see the parallels between that chapter of American history and this one.
“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,” the Riverside Democrat told the Associated Press in a recent interview.
“They’re put into these incarceration camps,” he said. “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.”
Echoes of history
President Trump’s campaign to achieve the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history is at an inflection point. Americans are seeing what it looks like to round up, detain and deport thousands of people, particularly in the aftermath of the deaths this year of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, U.S. citizens protesting the federal crackdown in Minneapolis.
The White House changed the leadership at the Department of Homeland Security as it reframes its approach. New Secretary Markwayne Mullin promised to keep the department off the front pages.
But Trump is also under mounting pressure from conservative groups not to let up on the goal of deporting 1 million people a year. The president’s Republican allies in Congress are fueling the immigration and deportation actions with billions of dollars in special funds.
Takano, the ranking Democrat on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, has drawn from his own family history — and the country’s eventual redress to Japanese Americans who were detained — to challenge Trump’s approach.
“We look back on that era of history as a shameful one, as a time when our political leaders failed the Constitution, failed the American people,” he said.
One family’s story among many
A high school history teacher before being elected to Congress in 2012, Takano grew up in Southern California and came to understand the family stories.
His grandfather Isao Takano arrived in the U.S. from Hiroshima and married Kazue Takahashi, a U.S.-born citizen. Together they settled in Bellevue, Wash., and started a business growing tomatoes, strawberries and chrysanthemums for the marketplace in Seattle.
When the U.S. entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they were among some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, immigrants and those born in the U.S., forcibly relocated.
His father, William, was 2 years old when his family was sent in 1942 to the incarceration camp at Tule Lake in Central California. His mother, Nancy Tsugiye Sakamoto, born in California to American-born parents, was a year old when she was relocated to the detention facility in Heart Mountain, Wyo.
Then, as now, he said, people are being swept up in the anti-immigrant detentions.
“Will Americans generations from now visit ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ and think to themselves, how could our government do this?” Takano said during a House floor speech, referring to the Trump administration’s immigration detention facility in Florida.
“These future generations of Americans will look to us, the Congress, to see what we did to try to stop it.”
A Reagan-era law seen as model
Takano remembers his father taking him to see the land the family once owned. He learned about his great-uncles who served in the Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team of Japanese American soldiers; one was killed in action in Italy. He recalls his own father later collected donations for the national redress campaign.
In 1988 Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, which sought to apologize for the “grave injustice” that had been done and provide $20,000 to each person detained. President Reagan signed it into law.
Takano’s parents were among those who received a letter of apology from the federal government, he said, and a payment.
Talks are underway among some in Congress, he said, for a similar redress to the people who have had their car windows smashed in, their homes raided and livelihoods upended as part of Trump’s immigration enforcement operations.
“Remarkably the country did come to realize the mistake,” he said. “I believe we’re living through one of those eras of mistakes, and I believe we can come out of this moment stronger.”
Mascaro writes for the Associated Press.
