On Remembrance Day, call for end to immigrant detention

Monday, Feb. 19, marks the 82nd anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066, which resulted in the removal of over 125,000 people of Japanese descent from the West Coast, nearly 13,000 of them from Washington. The Japanese American community now commemorates this date with a national Day of Remembrance.

The very first Day of Remembrance took place in Seattle in 1978, organized by Japanese Americans who would eventually lead a campaign for reparations from the federal government. This year, the Japanese American community of Western Washington commemorates our historical legacy by calling for closure of the Northwest Detention Center, an immigrant prison in Tacoma operated by GEO Group, a private corporation. 

In 1983, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians concluded in its final report (“Personal Justice Denied”) that the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans by the U.S. government was due to “racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” This statement rings true over 40 years later. Today, we see racial prejudice in the numbers of people of color held at the detention center and the harsher treatment given to Black immigrants. War hysteria in the post-9/11 war on terror has led to the militarization of the border under the guise of national security. And in another failure of political leadership earlier this month, the Biden administration and Congress nearly traded away the right to asylum in exchange for an increase in military aid.

As a community that experienced the denial of basic human and constitutional rights, indefinite detention and multigenerational harms, Japanese Americans are deeply alarmed by the open targeting of immigrants and people of color by our own government and by the carceral system that denies undocumented people the human rights guaranteed by the Constitution. 

As citizens of the state of Washington, we are outraged by the continued operation of NWDC. This notorious prison is well-known for its human rights abuses against asylum-seekers who have been subjected to physical and sexual violence, inadequate medical care, insufficient and rotten food, solitary confinement and indefinite detention. When people detained have spoken out against abuses or sought outside assistance, they have faced retaliation from GEO Group guards and staff. Nine hunger strikes have erupted at NWDC within the last 12 months. People only choose a hunger strike when they feel they have no other recourse to defend their human rights and exert control over their bodies.

Japanese Americans experienced similar abuses at the hands of the state in 1942, when our families were detained at the Puyallup Fairgrounds, just 15 minutes away from NWDC. That year, our fellow Americans largely turned their backs while Japanese Americans were rounded up for detention. We sorely needed friends to stand by us then, and we fight to shut down NWDC now because we are determined to be the friends we wish we’d had in 1942.  

We call upon U.S. Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell to use their power and authority to cut federal funding to private, for-profit detention contractors like GEO Group. We call on Gov. Jay Inslee to fulfill the spirit of the Keep Washington Working Act, to ensure that all people are treated equally when interacting with the justice system, regardless of their immigration status.

We demand that Immigration and Customs Enforcement close NWDC and end its history of violence and human rights abuses, its lack of transparency and accountability, its holding of people in indefinite detention and isolation and its denial of the right to a speedy and humane asylum process. 

We demand that the U.S. end its practice of criminalizing immigration and asylum-seeking, stop separating migrant families, and end the use of immigration detention. Stop recycling former Japanese American incarceration sites for continued use against communities of color, such as Fort Sill in Oklahoma — a military site that held over 700 Japanese Americans during WWII that was proposed as a site to detain 1,600 unaccompanied immigrant children under the Trump administration. Thanks to opposition organized by Tsuru for Solidarity and allies, the proposal was pulled and the facility was never built. We can put an end to NWDC’s cruelty as well.

It is not enough to commemorate a grave past injustice. We must act together to stop the current one.

Stop repeating history.