by Gabe Ortíz

Posted April 3, 2025

 

Japanese American communities are warning that “history is repeating itself” following Donald Trump’s invocation of 1798 wartime law to help carry out his mass detention and deportation agenda. Not only is his unlawful proclamation a dangerous expansion of executive power – no president has ever sought to use this law in this manner until now – the 1789 wartime act was used as the basis to justify the internment of Japanese Americans in U.S. internment camps during World War II.

 

In San Francisco’s historic Japantown, more than 70 community members and advocates joined a survivor of U.S. internment camps for a March 20 press event issuing an urgent reminder that what’s past is prologue and that the administration’s actions represent a threat to the freedoms of all Americans. ​​The neighborhood was devastated by the previous invocation of the 1798 wartime act following the attack on Pearl Harbor. “The act, which led to the detention of Japanese, German and Italian nationals, was the precursor to the incarceration of over 120,000 people with Japanese ancestry during World War II,” KQED reported.

 

“We’re no longer in the place where we’re bracing,” Asian Law Caucus’ Carl Takei, a speaker at the San Francisco event, told KQED. “This is the point where fundamental aspects of our freedoms are very clearly at risk.”

 

Those who have already lived this horror are sounding the alarm for their fellow Americans. Dr. Satsuki Ina, a human rights leader, licensed psychotherapist, and co-founder of Tsuru for Solidarity, was born in California’s Tule Lake Segregation Center, the site of the largest U.S. internment. After four years of detention at Tule Lake, officials ripped away her father. “My father was taken and separated from us in 1945,” she said. “He was sent to an enemy alien prison camp in North Dakota. And my brother and mother and I were left behind.”

 

Conditions at these camps were bleak, with a number of locations in Arizona nicknamed “Roast ‘em, Toast ‘em and Dust ‘em” due to the heat, Tucson Sentinel reported. Many, if not most, lost their everything during internment. In Sacramento, the majority of Japanese Americans lost their homes and businesses, CapRadio reported. Ahead of the 2024 election, actor George Takei recalled how soldiers pointed their bayonets at his family and ordered them out of their house. He was just five at the time. “That terror is seared into my brain,” he said in November.

 

We’re no longer in the place where we’re bracing. This is the point where fundamental aspects of our freedoms are very clearly at risk.”
Carl Takei, Asian Law Caucus

 

Many Japanese Americans were also successful farmers in the years leading up to the war. “After FDR signed Executive Order 9066, many were forced to sell or lease their land far below market value,” said Densho, which documents the oral histories of Japanese Americans. “Some scholars argue that seizing this lucrative property was a major motivation behind Japanese American incarceration.” But Densho said that some had friends who helped care for their property during their incarceration. One neighbor, Bob Fletcher, “quit his job in order to maintain Japanese American farms and accounts, then handed a large portion of the profits back to the families after the war.”

 

Dr. Ina and advocates with Tsuru for Solidarity now fight against inhumane detention policies, including protesting the first Trump administration’s plan to detain children at the site of a former World War II internment camp. “Not okay in 1942! Not okay now!” read one sign. When the Japanese American elders refused to end the protest outside Oklahoma’s Fort Sill, they were insulted by U.S. military police, Democracy Now! reported in 2019. “You need to move,” the officer screamed. “What don’t you understand? It’s English. Get out!”

 

Dr. Ina said during the March 20 press event in Japantown “that the pain and trauma is coming back nearly eight decades later,” CBS News Bay Area reported. “Like a nightmare that has been reawakening the trauma of my own family’s experience of being dehumanized, abused, and humiliated by their unjust incarceration,” she said. “They were innocent people, they were just victims of horrible racial bigotry and government’s intent to remove a whole group of people.”

 

In L.A.’s Little Tokyo, Kyoko Oda, president of the Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition and another Tule Lake survivor, “reflected on the fear immigrant families experienced being separated,” The Orange County Register reported. “I hate the fear that is rampant, hurting people just like in (the 1940s),” Oda told the outlet. “I oppose the [1798 act] because it reopens deep wounds and inflicts new ones.”

 

Japanese American community members and advocates used the March 18 press event to urge Congress to pass the Neighbors Not Enemies Act, which was reintroduced by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) this past January and would repeal the draconian 1798 law that was the basis for the unjust internment of Ina, Oda, and their families in inhumane conditions. Experts and advocates warned that the Trump administration’s expanded immigration crackdown is just the tip of a very dangerous spear aimed at the heart of American democracy and the freedoms of all Americans.

 

“If the government can use the [1798 law] to summarily jail and deport people based only on untested accusations that they have ties to a gang, with no further process, it could serve as a tool for all sorts of human rights abuses,” UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy co-director Ahilan Arulanantham told The Orange County Register. “It could be used to target people based on their race, based on their political associations, and for various other reasons that should be constitutionally protected.”

 

Trump invoked the wartime act in order to purge hundreds of individuals to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, which reporting later revealed could have possibly occurred in violation of a court order. ICE has since admitted that “many” of those sent to El Salvador have no criminal record at all. We also now know that some were targeted based on tattoos that have nothing to do with gangs. In just one example, the administration expelled a professional soccer player to El Salvador based on a tattoo that paid homage to the soccer club Real Madrid, his attorney said,” Huff Post reported.

 

Takei said this rapid purge of individuals “could be the first step in a dangerous progression that mirrors the blueprint of the gradual expansion of arrests and detentions during World War II,” KQED continued.

 

“‘These initial roundups of Japanese immigrants who were not U.S. citizens were based on very thin evidence,’ said Takei, who shared how the FBI targeted his great-grandfather for speaking to civilian ship captains who were mistaken for Japanese naval officials.” This first stage, Takei said, “is the one that looks very much like what is happening right now — that is the roundups of the Issei (immigrant) generation on the basis of the [wartime act] invocation, and the phase that came after that was a much bigger roundup of everybody, citizens and noncitizens alike.”

 

In a March 26 statement, the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus said that Trump’s invocation of the wartime act takes “a page straight from the authoritarian playbook to scapegoat immigrant communities and erode the very principles that underpin our democracy. This administration is even invoking the same law used to forcefully incarcerate Japanese Americans during WWII to circumvent immigration law under the guise of national security.”

 

“President Trump’s actions are ripping families apart and sending a chilling message that no one is safe—not even legal permanent residents who pay their taxes, contribute to the economy, and have called this country home for years,” the statement continued.

 

The Japanese American National Museum’s Kenyon Mayeda also called Trump’s invocation of the wartime act “an alarming overreach of executive power.” He noted that the March 18 press event took place at the very location where Japanese Americans were rounded up by their own government simply because of their ancestry and separated from their homes, neighborhoods, and jobs.

 

“This was where Japanese Americans boarded buses to be taken to (the internment) camp,” Mayeda told The Orange County Register. “This place serves as a reminder of the dark chapter that remains one of the most egregious violations of civil rights in American history, later condemned by Congress and acknowledged as a grave mistake. We must not repeat it.”

 

Gabe Ortíz is Editor at America’s Voice.