Activists in San Francisco's Japantown take stand against recent deportations
Community activists and neighbors gathered at in San Francisco's Japantown on Thursday to stand in solidarity for immigrants facing deportation.
The rally was held at the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California.
For 80-year-old Satsuki Ina, the co-founder of Tsuru for Solidarity, said the recent deportations under the Trump administration bring back the harsh memories of her life in an internment camp during World War II.
Ina's parents were Japanese Americans, living in San Francisco. But it all came to a halt after Pearl Harbor.
"The were coerced into signing for the government to determine who was loyal and who was not loyal, because they answered no to that questionnaire, they were transferred to Tule Lake Segregation Center," Ina said.
She was later born in the concentration camp. Ina said her family was incarcerated for more than four years.
"My father was taken and separated from us in 1945. He was sent to an enemy alien prison camp in North Dakota. And my brother and mother and I were left behind," she said.
Ina said the pain and trauma is coming back nearly eight decades later. President Donald Trump recently invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the same act enforced to arrest Japanese Americans in World War II.
Under the act, Trump deported more than 200 Venezuelans to El Salvador, alleging that they have gang ties regardless of their immigration statuses.
"Like a nightmare that has been reawakening the trauma of my own families experience of being dehumanized, abused, and humiliated by their unjust incarceration. They were innocent people, they were just victims of horrible racial bigotry and government's intent to remove a whole group of people," Ina said.
A federal judge blocked Trump from removing immigrants under this act, but community activists like Jeffery Matsuoka say the fight for immigrants isn't over.
"As descendants of immigrants, and survivors of internment camps in World War II, we see the same situation happen now that happened to our community among other immigrant communities in the United States," Matsuoka told CBS News Bay Area.
His mother, who was living in Peru, was taken and sent to an internment camp in Texas in a prisoner swap. She was one of more than 125,000 immigrants, many American citizens of Japanese descent, imprisoned during the war.
Matsuoka said the history is still felt throughout Japantown, like at the language school, Kinmon Gakuen.
"Japanese Americans lining up there right here in this hallway, going down into the auditorium to be registered to be deported and taken to camps," Matsuoka said, pointing at black and white photos of Japanese Americans at the school alleyway.
He and Ina said they will continue to rally together, and stand in solidarity with immigrants facing deportation.
They may have different names and different faces. But their families have this in common: their fight to survive and keep on their legacy.
