Jill Cowan
From the passenger seat of a sky blue Prius, Amy Oba craned her neck to get a look at the federal detention center, a hulking tower surrounded by a black chain-link fence and laced with barbed wire. On a recent evening, she was on patrol, part of a group of Japanese Americans who are keeping a watchful eye on the actions of immigration agents in Los Angeles.
“I definitely think about my family when we organize, when we go out on patrols, because that could have been my family in prison,” said Ms. Oba, 33. “It’s just a difference of what, like, 80 years?”
During World War II, Ms. Oba’s grandparents were among the more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who were forced by the federal government to live for years in remote, hastily constructed internment camps across the West.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, backed by the Supreme Court, treated the Japanese Americans as national security threats because of their ethnicity. Families left behind communities, businesses, homes and even pets. Some of them never returned. It wasn’t until the Reagan administration that the government apologized and said it would pay compensation to families who were affected.
Now, as the Trump administration carries out its immigration crackdown, Japanese Americans see chilling similarities to what their families experienced.
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