The Japanese American Citizens League issued a statement Aug. 28 that called the federal government’s new detention center operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at Fort Bliss, Texas, a “disgrace to the memory and legacy of the more than 125,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans unjustly imprisoned during World War II.”
The Trump administration’s decision to open the facility, which can hold up to 5,000 inmates, is especially irksome to JACL because the active military installation was also used during World War II to “confine Issei, first-generation Japanese immigrants.”
In a related development, the Associated Press reported that the Trump administration awarded the $1.2 billion contract to build and operate the Fort Bliss facility not to “a large government contractor or even a firm that specializes in private prisons” but to Acquisition Logistics LLC, a “small business that has no listed experience running a correction facility” that “lacks a functioning website and lists as its address a modest home in suburban Virginia owned by a 77-year-old retired Navy flight officer.”
In its statement, the JACL drew a distinction between the 10 concentration camps operated by the War Relocation Authority that incarcerated tens of thousands of ethnic Japanese, including U.S. citizens, forcibly removed from the West Coast and the several internment camps operated by the DOJ and INS that targeted “enemy aliens” through the Alien Enemies Act. In both cases, however, due process was ignored. During WWII, Fort Bliss was among the facilities that held first-generation Japanese immigrants who were at that time proscribed from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens.
In its statement, JACL also said: “While the terminology has shifted from ‘enemy alien’ to ‘illegal alien,’ the outcome remains the same: the dehumanization of entire groups of people and their mass detention without regard for the protections for all persons guaranteed under the Constitution.”
To read the entirety of the JACL statement, visit here.
To read the AP news article, visit here.
