Koji Kudo, ID badge #4441-G. His head is shaved, likely by one of my aunts, with the old manual hair clippers that he used to complain cut into his scalp. He’s barely 53 inches tall — 4-foot-4 — according to the height chart behind him. The badge is sealed in orange plastic and fastened by a metal bolt attached to a safety pin for display during his incarceration. Koji, the boy who 37 years later would become my father, is 10 years old just then, an American-born citizen. He has already been imprisoned by his government for more than a year.
On Dec. 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, a “day of infamy” that brought war to America. People of Japanese ancestry soon found their loyalty questioned, despite many of them having lived in the United States for their entire lives. A few months later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 beginning the incarceration of approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast — more than two-thirds of whom were native-born citizens — as well as roughly 15,000 people of Italian and German descent. Within about four years, my father and his siblings had lost their birthright citizenship and been deported to Japan.
America is now poised to allow a new version of the same profound injustice that nearly destroyed my family to happen again. Donald Trump has vowed that upon returning to the presidency on Monday, he will move immediately to begin rounding up as many as 20 million immigrants — including U.S. citizens born here and granted birthright citizenship — and deport them. If he achieves his goal, approximately one in 16 people living in America could be imprisoned and deported during the next four years. The time between President Roosevelt’s executive order and the first arrival to the Manzanar War Relocation Center was 30 days. If Mr. Trump issues his own order on Day 1, as he’s vowed, the first people could enter detention camps by February.
Long before becoming president, Roosevelt had promoted anti-Asian and eugenicist views. In a 1925 newspaper column, he wrote, “Anyone who has traveled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of 10, the most unfortunate results.”
The eugenicist movement achieved a major victory when President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Immigration Act of 1924, which led to the creation of the U.S. Border Patrol and established strict immigration quotas that sought to preserve the country’s existing racial composition by prioritizing immigration from Northern and Western European countries while cutting off Asian immigration almost entirely.
My grandfather had come here in 1906 and found work as a farm laborer as part of the issei, or first generation of migrants, who arrived on the West Coast from Japan at the turn of the century. By the time of Roosevelt’s executive order, my grandfather had lived in America for about 36 years, married and had six children (my father was the youngest), and used the savings he’d built up to start a flower and cactus nursery in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles. In March 1942 Lt. Gen. John DeWitt, the senior military commander responsible for the system of internal incarceration, issued proclamations ordering an 8 p.m. curfew and travel restrictions for people of Japanese descent, as well as the confiscation of shortwave radios, weapons and cameras in their possession — probably including the one my family used to record their life before the war.
Eventually, a forced removal order was given. My family whittled their possessions down to the bags they could carry and one trunk. My grandfather lost his nursery, his house and his belongings without due process, and my father was forced to give up the family dog he loved. Many Japanese small-business owners ended up getting pennies on the dollar in fire sales, or sold property to neighbors who promised to return it after the war only to renege.
How could this happen?
Roosevelt’s government acted with a popular mandate, and was aided by mayors and governors. An American Institute of Public Opinion poll conducted in March 1942 found that 93 percent of Americans supported the incarceration of Japanese noncitizens, while 59 percent supported the forced relocation of citizens.
But even in this dire situation, some Japanese Americans resisted.
Legal challenges were first filed by Minoru Yasui, an Oregon lawyer and Army reserve officer who had been turned away when he reported for duty after Pearl Harbor and was later refused enlistment nine times; and by Gordon Hirabayashi, a conscientious objector. Both defied the curfew order in acts of civil disobedience.
They were followed by Fred Korematsu, who refused an order to report for forced relocation so he could remain with his Italian American girlfriend in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Mitsuye Endo, a California Department of Motor Vehicles employee fired along with every state employee of Japanese ancestry, who filed a habeas corpus petition challenging her incarceration in the camps. It would be more than two years before the last of their cases reached the Supreme Court.
My father was 9 when he arrived at Manzanar and often described it to me like a summer camp. He talked about sleeping in cabins without privacy, the dust, the wind and the weather, but little of the psychological or spiritual ramifications his parents and older siblings must have done their best to conceal from him.
Resistance to the incarceration at Manzanar soon led to a prison uprising that the Army put down by shooting 11 prisoners, killing two. Afterward, internees were forced to complete a questionnaire to identify and segregate those who were disloyal to America. Those who answered no to Questions 27 and 28 — which asked whether respondents would serve in the military on combat duty “wherever ordered” and required them to swear “unqualified allegiance to the United States of America” — earned the moniker “no-no boys.”
There were a variety of reasons for the detainees to answer no-no: the confusing nature of the questions, the fear that those who answered yes would be immediately drafted and the desire to protest a government that had denied them their basic human rights. Whatever my grandfather’s reasoning for doing so, my family was transferred to the maximum-security prison Tule Lake, which, according to Densho, a digital historical archive of the Japanese American incarceration, had 28 guard towers, 1,000 soldiers, armored vehicles and tanks.
In 1943, Yasui and Hirabayashi’s court cases challenging a military curfew based on ethnicity reached the Supreme Court, which sided with the government. On Dec. 18, 1944, the court decided the cases of Korematsu and Endo, which challenged the incarceration order itself. In a 6-3 decision, the court sided against Korematsu, allowing the exclusion of Americans of Japanese descent from the West Coast. But in Endo’s case, the court recognized the right of “loyal” citizens to due process, marking the beginning of the end for Roosevelt’s policy. Some were allowed to leave the camps, but those who remained at Tule Lake continued to face indefinite imprisonment.
Because the government couldn’t legally deport citizens except in cases of treason, Congress passed the Denaturalization Act of 1944, which provided a legal pathway for the removal of naturalized citizenship. Families like mine faced an impossible choice: accept deportation and receive your freedom, or refuse and remain incarcerated indefinitely.
In August 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing Japan to surrender and putting an end to the war, but my family wasn’t released until Dec. 29. My grandfather, having lost everything and embittered by a nation that had turned its back on him, agreed to face deportation, so that he and his children could be released. After more than three years incarcerated without cause or due process, my family left the United States on a military transport ship, the General Gordon. Only 81 days later, Tule Lake became the final American concentration camp to close.
My father and his siblings were among 5,589 American Nisei, or second-generation members, who lost their birthright citizenship and were forced to return to a war-devastated Japan that most of them had never known. My dad spoke little of his time in Kumamoto other than to tell me all he had to eat were sweet potatoes, which he detested for the rest of his life, and which my grandfather distilled into shochu that he began drinking too much of.
One day my grandfather took him to the seashore to ask him what he wanted to be when he grew up. “I told him I wanted to become a doctor,” my father would recall to me, before describing his father’s shame over the life he’d condemned his children to.
Recognizing that a dream born in America could be fulfilled only there, my grandfather began fighting to reclaim my father’s citizenship. Wayne M. Collins, the civil rights attorney who had represented Korematsu and Endo before the Supreme Court, went on to challenge citizenship renunciations. By the time my father, then age 15, applied to reclaim his birthright citizenship, a process had been created.
On Dec. 8, 1947, my father became an American citizen once more when he received a letter signed by U. Alexis Johnson from the U.S. Consular Service at Yokohama — he saved it for the rest of his life. Soon after, he received a passport, which was stamped upon his entry in San Francisco on March 3, 1948. But the family friend who was supposed to meet him at the port never arrived. He was homeless until child services placed him with a white foster family where he learned to smoke cigarettes and drive a stick shift.
In 1958, my grandparents returned to the United States along with the last of my father’s siblings. That year, my dad became the first in our family to graduate from college, an education funded by the G.I. Bill after his Army service during the Korean War, and was accepted into the medical school that would become the University of California, Irvine. Four years later, my father took the Hippocratic oath at the school’s white coat ceremony with my grandparents watching from the audience.
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As my father put distance between himself and Tule Lake, so did the country. Intelligence reports later revealed that Japanese Americans did not pose a credible security threat to the United States. In 1983, the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians reported that the internment program was a “grave injustice” driven by “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which offered a formal apology to surviving victims.
In 1990, the U.S. government awarded $20,000 to each of the 82,250 survivors. But the damage done to my family, as to so many families that had been incarcerated, would never be repaired. Despite my father’s professional success, his experience at the hands of the government would create a lasting injury that he would self-medicate with alcohol, like his own father, until he died of liver cancer at the age of 66.
The parallels between then and now are impossible to ignore. Mr. Trump has exploited the fear and anger surging through the country after an uncontrolled epidemic and an economy devastated by a major recession to scapegoat a group of people who’d come here in search of nothing more than the American dream. As in the 1940s, complicit state and local government officials are already signaling a willingness to help him.
If Mr. Trump carries out his plans, they would surely result in violations of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees that those born or naturalized in the United States are citizens; that their rights and immunities as citizens cannot be restricted; and that the state cannot “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
But we know from that same history that injustices like this can be resisted. And now we must. To confront the Trump government without compromise, we must raise what Martin Luther King Jr. called a “coalition of conscience.” Elected leaders must oppose the assault on constitutional rights they’ve sworn to uphold and defend. Mayors and governors of sanctuary cities must unite in opposition, file legal challenges, and refuse to allow local law enforcement, administrative and logistical resources from being used to carry out this immoral policy. And we must fight state by state in every single election for every single office until we have turned back the tide of cruelty sweeping across America.
Individuals will need to engage in protest and nonviolent civil disobedience. We must pressure John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch to join their liberal colleagues on the Supreme Court when the first test case of the new deportation order reaches them. Both have repudiated the court’s decision in Korematsu, with Chief Justice Roberts writing, “Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and — to be clear — ‘has no place in law under the Constitution.’”
Nearly a century of thought about World War II and the rise of fascism has warned us of this moment. As the scholar of totalitarianism Timothy Snyder writes: “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
Instead, let us now follow the example set by those who resisted. The example set by people like Yasui, Hirabayashi, Korematsu and Endo, Wayne M. Collins, “no-no boys” like my grandfather, my aunts and uncle and my father, who along with more than a hundred thousand others inside the camps engaged in the everyday act of defiance known simply as survival. They passed on their stories so that when the time came, we would know what to do to preserve the miracle that is an America where all children are born equal in the eyes of the law.
The post A Racist Purge Almost Destroyed My Family. Another One Is Coming. appeared first on New York Times.
