Americans of Japanese heritage say they hear echoes of their families’ forced internment in the Trump administration’s newest immigrant detention site.
Homeland Security officials say President Donald Trump‘s sweeping mass deportation campaign requires a build-up of detention centers to bridge the gap between arrests and removals. They’ve turned to the U.S. military and private contractors to get the job done, including erecting the nation’s largest immigrant detention site on Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas.
But stewards of Japanese American history, including the children and grandchildren of those who were held in detention, are criticizing the use of Fort Bliss and the plans to expand immigrant detention on American military bases.
Fort Bliss was a “cog” in the United States Japanese internment machine, said Brian Niiya, a historian and content director at Densho, a nonprofit that chronicles Japanese American internment.
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At a cost of $1.2 billion, the camp has the capacity to detain 5,000 people. Roughly 1,000 men were being held there in mid-August, according to U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, an El Paso Democrat whose district includes Fort Bliss.
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A Cato Institute analysis of government data in June found ICE was arresting four times more noncriminals each week on the streets than people with convictions. ICE’s own data show that 45% of the roughly 59,000 people in custody in mid-August had no criminal record or charges.
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The Biden administration also used Fort Bliss to house migrants who crossed the border as unaccompanied children.
Under Biden, the Fort Bliss “emergency intake site” run by a private contractor was used to process the children for admission into the United States – not for deportation. Still, survivors and descendants of Japanese internment staged a protest at the facility in 2021 to call attention to the poor conditions there, including problems related to child safety and case management that were later documented in a 2022 federal report.
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As historians, Niiya said, “We always used to say that it’s important to know this (history) so that we can prevent things from ever happening again… But perhaps we can’t say that anymore.”
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