Transcript of Live community event: Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order

Japanese Americans, almost entirely without help, found ways to survive and to resist in their own way, not just in that moment, but also for decades afterwards.

And we see their legacy on the streets of LA today. What's up, LA? What's up, LA?

Good evening, good evening, good evening.

Welcome to the show. My name is Jacob Soberow from MS Now. We are all so very, very, very glad that you are here. I don't know about you guys, but I have learned so much, so much from Rachel's podcast, Burn Order. There is no story more central to the American experience than the story of mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans. And tonight, we are going to meet some of the people who are in the podcast who know this history like nobody else. It's going to be a great night. And now, because I cannot wait one minute more, please join me in welcoming to the stage my friend, my colleague, the host of the event, the great Rachel Maddo. Thank you. Thank you. Have fun. Thanks, Sam. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, wow. I am very happy to see you all. Thank you. Hi, you guys. Hi. Wow, there's so many people here. I'm now going to put on my reading glasses so I can't see you because you make me nervous. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you all so, so, so much. Oh, yeah, that's better. Now you're all a blur. This is good. It is great to see you.

It is great to be here at the beautiful Orpheum Theater. Thank you. I'm going to put my other glasses on. I like seeing you. It's That's better. Yes, you're an unusually good-looking group. Actually, let me just say, before we get going, I don't know how many people you came here with tonight. I don't know how many people were in your Uber or whatever. But before you leave here tonight, meet somebody new. Just say hi to somebody who you haven't met before before you leave. You have one thing That's what we're doing in common, right? Find a stranger, make eye contact, say hello. I'm a Catholic. At Catholic at Catholic Mass. We do this peace be with you thing. This is the moment to do peace be with you, whether or not you touch. All right. See, don't you feel better already? Yes. The future is analog, I'm telling you. The more we know each other offline, the safer and better we're all going to be. The Marquis, the beautiful Orphium Theater Marquis you all passed under to enter into the theater tonight, that Marquis is just an LA classic. You can't really imagine this part of the city without it.

As bright and distinctive as it is today as it's ever been. That sign on the front of this theater has been lighting up for 84 years. It was put up in 1941. And within a year of that sign going up, just up the road from here in Little Tokyo, Japanese Americans were subjected to a racial decree from the US Army. Without warrants, without hearings, without any probable cause, they were taken from their homes, whole families taken from their homes. They were forced to They fell almost everything they owned. They were told they could take only what they could carry. They went to assembly centers where they were held, in some cases, in horse stalls. Then they were taken on, eventually, to incarceration camps, and they were not detained there. They were not interned there. They were incarcerated there against their will for years. And that's what I I guess, as the immoral clarity of that. That today is as bright and distinctive as it has ever been, just like that marquee. And it's maybe even more bright and more distinctive today. This is Fort Bliss, Texas. Fort Bliss is a real fort, a historic and continuing installation of the United States Army.

It's just outside El Paso, Texas. See how El Paso scoops up on it like that? Today, Fort Bliss is the site of the largest immigrant prison in the country. The Trump administration put up a hastily constructed tent camp there this summer. It's been growing ever since. They've got just under 3,000 people there right now. The White House has said, Proudly, they plan to keep adding more. They say they have built room for 5,000. But just look Let me get that photo for a second. I will tell you, you have not seen a lot of photos like this. This photo is hard to get. We got this photo. We just got this photo. We bought it from a longtime Texas photographer who's an army veteran who has been documenting the expansion of this immigrant prison camp at Fort Bliss in the Texas Desert. He took this aerial shot less than two weeks ago. As you can see there, there's these long rows of what appear to be semi-permanent white tents, and they've taken over this entire section of the base. I will tell you that's the closest we can get to seeing what's going on side, but we are starting to get some information destination.

The ACLU and the Texas Civil Rights and Human Rights Watch sent a letter to US ICE officials earlier today detailing accounts of horrific conditions, including alleged beating, medical neglect, insufficient food and sexual abuse by officers against detained migrants.

What happens inside the nation's largest migrant detention site? And why are advocates sounding the alarm? Well, new allegations from detainees at Camp East Montana point to abuse, unsafe conditions, and struggles to reach attorneys.

The ACLU calls it a warning as federal officials push back saying conditions are humane.

Because this is on a military base, they may be hoping that this site at Fort Bliss is essentially off the radar of both the public and the Constitution. It is difficult for people who are locked up at this site to speak to lawyers. It is hard for any of us to know what the process is that got the people who are there locked up there. It is hard for us to know who's in charge. It's on a military base, but operated by a private contractor. Nobody admits that they are accountable to the public in terms of letting anybody know what the conditions are. It's hard to get photos of what it looks like from the outside, let alone to find out who is inside. A black site, a legal black box in America, in the middle of the desert. If this feels familiar, it may be because this same site, Fort Bliss, was also the site of a hastily constructed incarceration camp for immigrants 83 years ago during World War II. Same place. This This is Terminal Island. This is about 25 miles south of where we are tonight in Los Angeles. Over the summer, immigration agents used Terminal Island as a staging area for their raids across LA.

When we saw those masked federal agents jumping out of unmarked cars and grabbing people off the streets in LA, those agents started their operation at Terminal Island. This is Terminal Island a little over 80 years ago. When it was a fishing village, home to thousands of Japanese immigrants and US-born Japanese Americans. In February 1942, the people who lived on Terminal Island were among the first Japanese Americans on the West Coast to be forced out of their homes. They were rounded up and sent to prison camps. Their thriving fishing village there, and everybody's homes there were bulldozed. This is the corner of First Street and Central Avenue in Little Tokyo. This is less than two miles from here. In 1942, this corner was home to a Buddhist temple. And invoking the Alien Enemies Act, which you've heard a lot about this year, the FBI arrested most of the staff at that temple and sent them to various prison camps. From that temple, the one person who worked there who remained, the one person who was left alone, was one Buddhist minister with the classically Japanese name, so forgive my pronunciation here if I get it wrong.

His name was Julius Goldwater. He was not Japanese, which is why he was left. He actually was a first cousin to the future archconservative Republican presidential candidate and Senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater. But because Julius Goldwater was not Japanese, he was the one who was left behind at the temple when everybody else was taken. Then when he was left behind, he did what he could to at least safeguard the possessions of his Japanese-American friends and colleagues who were rounded up. He at least tried to safeguard their homes personally as best he could. He was one of the very, very, very few non- Japanese-American allies who stepped up to help. When the wide widespread arrests and seizures of property right after Pearl Harbor expanded to a policy targeting not just so-called alien enemies, but targeting all people of Japanese descent, a racial decree. That temple at the corner of first and central is where ordinary Japanese Americans, whole families, were ordered to assemble to be put on busses to be relocated, as they said, relocated to the camps. Today, the temple is the site of the Japanese American National Museum. Just a few months ago, California's governor, Gavin Newsom, was giving a speech inside that museum, specifically inside the democracy center at that museum, when masked, heavily armed federal agents swarmed the Plaza outside and then started mugging for the cameras.

We're here making Los Angeles a sacred place, since we won't have politicians that will do that. We do that ourselves. That's what we're here today, as you can see. Already making it a safer place. We're glad to be here. Not going anywhere. The governor's inside right there. I don't know where he's at. He's about 100 feet behind us. I said, LA.

When that happened, when that happened, when all those mast federal agents showed up on Democracy Plaza in August.

Angelino named Rumi Fujimodo was at the counter of her family's store in Little Tokyo, a store where they sell every imaginable variety of the coolest Dodgers merch you have ever seen in your life. Ms. Fujimodo heard the commotion. She later told the New York Times that she just, without thinking, just tore out of her store, started shouting to everyone that the immigration agents were there, trying to warn her neighbors. She told the Times, I felt like Paul Revere. That day, that same day, you saw all of those people, you saw all of those Angelenos chanting, Ice out of LA, chanting, Ice out of LA, and then making sure that it happened, pushing those federal agents back, taunting them down the block as they turned tail and left. Los Angeles, God bless you. You have not taken any of this lying down. You have chased ICE vehicles out of your neighborhoods with bullhorn. You have delivered food to your neighbors who are afraid to leave their homes. You have marched and protested and shouted and jeered and given one finger salutes and swore and made the federal government's chimbolic shows of force look petty and small.

You have declared a countywide state of emergency to help people and protect people the same way you would if their lives had been upended by some terrible natural disaster. Although this disaster is very much manmade. La, you have been a force to be reckoned with. You are helping yourselves. You are helping your country. You have been a force to be reckoned with. You have endured and outlasted this attack on your city, just as you will the next one. It's still happening. It is still happening. And you have been here before. Back then, when the American government began sweeping up people across LA based solely and explicitly on their race, Japanese Americans, almost entirely without help, found ways to survive and to resist in their own way, not just in that moment, but also for decades afterwards. We see their legacy on the streets of LA today. We see it in members of the group, Niki Progressives, driving around town, keeping a watchful eye out for immigration agents. Amy Oba's grandparents were among the more than 125,000 Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in this country simply because of their race during World War II. Amy recently told the New York Times, she said, I definitely think about my family when we organize, when we go out on patrols, because that could have been my family in prison.

It's just a difference of what? Like, 80 years? That's what we're We're going to talk about tonight. We are going to meet people whose families were affected directly by the mass incarceration in the 1940s. We are going to talk with people who have made it their life's work to study it and to make sure we get it right. People who have been beyond generous with me and Mike Jarvis and Kelsey Desiderio and Jenn Mulraney Donovan as we have produced this labor of love, Burn Order. We are going to meet some local elected leaders tonight who are standing in the breach today and some of the activists who are helping them. We're going to take questions from you guys. Very, very, very excited to get going tonight. Thank you so, so much for being here. Let's talk. It was a crime by the government.

They had no idea what was going to happen. My mother said in her diary, I wonder if today's the day they're going to line us up and shoot us.

One of the most radical policies ever carried out in the United States.

When I started researching, I came across my own files, and it gives my name. I think I'm three months. In the column about the status, I was an enemy alien.

One of the most radical policies ever even tried in the United States.

America had never incarcerated a mass body of a citizen before.

For one key man inside the government, this was his crusade.

Robin Netzen was absolutely the architect of the program of forced removal and imprisonment. He consistently believed the loyalty of Japanese Americans could never be determined.

The US military deployed on the streets of America.

It was tremendous anxiety as they saw neighbors and friends being taken.

Whole community is targeted for removal.

Anybody with 116th Japanese blood was not likely, but was a threat to national security. That was the justification for taking these children and putting them into prison.

A shambolic process.

They're doing this on the fly, making things up as they go along.

When accountability finally came knocking, there was the burn order to cover it all up.

Copies of the original report were ordered, destroyed. They were burned. It was absolutely stunning that these documents existed. It was that classic smoking gun evidence that every lawyer wants to find.

It was a stain on this country, one that we said we would never repeat.

Many of us were Japanese-Americans whose parents and grandparents had been incarcerated. For the opportunity for us to bring a case that would try and address the injustice of their incarceration was an opportunity of a lifetime.

Please welcome Here tonight, live, Dr. Satsuki Ina, Mr. Frank Abe, and Professor Laure Benaer. Such an honor to have all three of you here with us. Let me tell people who you are. They know you from born order, from your beautiful and distinctive voices. Dr. Ena was born at the Tulip Lake Prison Camp in California. She is a psychotherapist, a filmmaker. She's the author of an incredible book about her family history and her own journey of healing and activism. It's called The Poet and the Silt Girl. It's very good. You should read it. She's also the co founder of the social justice organization, Tzu Ru for Solidarity, which has a starring role in episode 6 of the podcast. Frank Ave is a journalist and activist and writer and historian and filmmaker. Frank's father was incarcerated at Heart Mountain. In 1978, Frank helped organize the first Day of Remembrance in Seattle, which was one of the key events helping kickstart the campaign for redress. Frank's graphic novel about the resistance to wartime incarceration is called We Hereby Refuse. If you have not read it yet, it will blow your mind. He's also the co-editor of an indispensable anthology from Penguin called The Literature of Japanese-American Incarceration.

He knows how to do this. Laura Binai is with us. Professor I. Her family was incarcerated at the Santa Anita Race Trap, and then at Manzanar. As a brand new young baby lawyer, she was part of the legal team that overturned the conviction of Fred Korematsu in 1983. Today, she is Professor Emerita at Seattle University School of Law, and she's the author of a brilliant biography of Fred Korematsu, which is called Enduring Conviction. It is It's such a privilege to have all three of you here. I got to say, I'm very nervous to talk with you. I'm intimidated by all of your presence. Lori, let me start with you. I want to ask you to contextualize a little bit the incarceration policy. Obviously, it did not come out of nowhere. The policy arrived in the context of a long string of discriminatory laws. Can you talk a little bit about how that made the policy possible? What we should understand about that now?

Absolutely. Any understanding of the wartime incarceration has to take place understanding the history of discrimination against Japanese Americans. Japanese Americans were denied the ability to become citizens. They were denied the ability to own the land that they worked. There were anti-misdemeanors laws preventing Japanese from intermarrying with Whites, and some Japanese American kids went to segregated schools. So there's a whole history of exclusion and othering and being treated as foreign and dangerous. I think about the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast as an ultimate exclusion after a history of exclusion in this country. It's against this backdrop that the bombing of Pearl Harbor took place. Of course, that's the match that activated all of the activists, anti-Japanese activists. There were civic groups you mentioned in your podcast, the farmers, agricultural organizations, politicians on every level of government, the media, all calling for the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. And so even though there might have been certainly some of the government officials identified in the podcast who actuated the program of incarceration, it was indeed a popular act where people had sought ways to get rid of Japanese Americans from the West Coast for decades and decades, and this was the opportunity to make it happen.

And to that point, Frank, I was thinking about the Earl Warren arc of history. Earl Warren obviously ends up being a very different figure in popular imagination than he was in that moment leading up to the incarceration policy. I think if you look at it as as a political realist, I don't know what was in his heart, but certainly, Earl Warren and the other politicians who got on this bandwagon, so many in Congress and in the United States Senate, benefited politically from their vitriol and their lies about Japanese Americans. It was good politics, this incarceration policy. That thing doesn't end when the policy ends, and that thing still has its tail on by the time it gets to the point where you're trying to get redress for this movement. I was wondering, Frank, if you could just talk about how those politics, the politics, the beneficial politics of racism for the racists, have infected this all along.

Well, Japanese Americans got out of the camps, and America still viewed our parents and grandparents as somewhat suspect. I mean, they must have done something wrong. Otherwise, why were they put in these prison camps? My parents' generation grew up with the idea that with people saying, Still, it was you guys who bombed Pearl Harbor after all. Remember Pearl Harbor? When we were growing up, it was a question of asking our parents, Mom, Dad, we just learned about this in school. How could you let this happen to you? Why did you go along? Why didn't you resist? The answer was the country was against us. People at the time still believe that Japanese Americans were suspects. At that time, we knew that we had to do something to change the narrative in this country, to turn the country around, and to understand two things, that one, the camps were wrong, and two, that the government needed to do something tangible to apologize and award a token compensation, not for our property losses and loss of freedom, but for the violations of the Constitution of due process and equal protection under the law. That was the underlying part of Rejust.

We need to know what happened so we don't do it again. It's amazing how it really is repeating itself.

Dr. Ena, you spoke really moving interestingly for our interview in the podcast about how during mass incarceration, there wasn't public outcry. I have heard a lot of white people respond to the podcast by really being stuck on that point and being filled with a lot of shame about that revelation. I think people thought once they knew that I was doing this podcast, there'd be more heroes. There are heroes, but there aren't a lot of heroes from that moment, and there aren't a lot of non- Japanese American heroes who are standing up for their neighbors. We are today seeing activism and outcry about the Trump administration's targeting of immigrants and minority groups. I wonder how you assess it in terms of the difference and how meaningful that difference is, instrumentally and also emotionally. Yeah.

Thank you for asking that question. One thing is clear is that as Japanese Americans, when we first heard news that children were being separated from their families, we realized that we are the people that we needed, that we had to show up as former child prisoners, unjustly incarcerated and separated from our families. Our work as part of our organization, Tsuut'u for Solidarity, was to activate Japanese Americans, help them make the connection about how this is so resonant, how it is a repetition of our history, and how important it is for us to stand together and speak out. Our Our secondary hope is that then you would see us standing up, many of us '80s and '90s, bringing our wheelchairs, our canes, our hearing aids, defying military officers when they ordered us to leave, standing in front of prison camps that had hundreds of children children separated from their parents. And we said, not now, not again. Stop repeating history.

Gloria, I think for some people listening to Burn Order who are maybe thinking hard about this history for the first time, the one name that they might have known about this story before spending this much time with it, I maybe other than FDR, is Korematsu. You, of course, worked on the legal team that overturned Mr. Korematsu's conviction. His conviction was vacated, which means his name was cleared for that conviction. The Supreme Court also said his case was wrongly decided. But you have written that the Korematsu case is still, in your words, a loaded weapon, that it is still legally dangerous and it is still out there.

Can you talk about that a little That's actually Justice Jackson in dissent in Korematsu said that Korematsu stands as a loaded weapon. Certainly foresaw the future here. Koreimatsu has not been overrun. We were able to vacate Fred's conviction. We were able to prove that Japanese Americans, there was no military necessity. The court was lied to, as was shown on the podcast. But the Korematsu Supreme Court decision wasn't overruled itself. We won at the lower court. We didn't get back up before the Supreme Court. One of the most frightening things about Korematsu that still persist today is that the court, during the Japanese-American cases said that we have to defer to the government when the government's acting in the name of national security. In fact, in Hirabayashi, the court said, When the government is called upon to exercise this judgment, the discretion by the war-making branches of government, it's not for the court to sit in judgment of their decisions. The court ultimately said, We only have to ask whether there's some rational basis for this. Then in Korematsu, they adopted that very deferential standard and upheld the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast on what we know now was a fraudulent record, right?

So fast forward to Trump versus Hawaii, where the court again said, in this regard to the Muslim ban, You know what? This is a matter of military of national security. Even though we have statements from Trump saying anti-Muslim statements, those don't really matter because on issues of national security. Security, the Court has to defer to the executive. And then still today, the government is asking the Court to defer on issues of national security, which would be bad enough. We all know the separation of powers, the checks and balances, right? And so to have An area where the Court's going to say, We don't really have a role to act as a check is incredibly frightening. Now, an even greater threat because the whole phrase national security, the limits of it are being pushed beyond belief. During World War II, military necessity, national security included picking up US citizens on US soil and rounding them up. We've also seen it rounding up people who are suspected of being the member of a gang and deporting them, restraining them, deporting them. We see mast ICE agents picking up people off the street in the name of national security, and we see our government firing on boats.

It feels particularly ominous to me that we're talking, once again, about getting rid of birthright citizenship, about denaturalizing people. You're a naturalized citizen if you were born elsewhere, but you became a citizen while living here. Even beyond that, the administration and the President has ranted sometimes about the idea of stripping American citizenship, even from the homegrowns, even from native-born citizens. The only reason you would want to do that is to be able to treat people in ways that you can't treat them if they are citizens.

Congress, in World War II had been, for decades, have been trying to strip the Nise and the ise, our parents and grandparents, of their citizenship, the Nise, the birthright citizenship, I should say, or to deport all the Japanese in America from the US. One part of the story was the Tulip Lake Segregation Center where Satsuki was born. And there, the government, 1944, Congress passed the Denaturalization Act, 1944, to Francis Biddle, the attorney general, knew they couldn't strip American citizens of their birthright citizenship, the Nusai. So they passed a bill to allow the Japanese in the camps to voluntarily renounce the US citizenship. And 5,000 at Tulio Lake took the bait, and they walked right into the trap and spent the next 10 years struggling to get back their citizenship once they realized the gravity of their mistake. So the effort, in World War II, America tried to get Japanese-Americans to self-deport. And even now, we're seeing the Trump administration trying to use the term self-deportation, offering incentives for immigrants just to leave on their own. It's a very frightening precedent.

And is the pretext under which they are making the conditions in these Black site camps so austere and terrible? They're saying, Well, we want it to be miserable so that you will self-deport. Yes.

Our fathers and grandfathers were taken away from our families. We know about family separation. We We were in prison for almost four years.

Dr. Ena, thinking about your group, TURU, for solidarity. Turu means cranes, right? Solidarity means solidarity. If Americans were to have real solidarity in this moment with each other, with immigrants of all stripes, with the people who need it most, what would that look like? What would we be doing differently than what we're doing now?

Well, first of all, I think being here tonight is part of the resistance we need to build.

No making your host cry. Not allowed.

We need people to humanize the process this that's happening now, this harm that is being perpetrated. As a child born in a prison camp, my life has been tainted by the trauma that my parents suffered holding me in their arms. We're damaging children every day while they're held in these prison camps. People are afraid that, like my mother felt, that maybe today's the day they're going to line us up and shoot us. We need to speak up. I think it doesn't have to be all the grand big national things. It is even the small actions that create solidarity, offering help in some ways, whether it's food or accompagnment to the courts, whether it's speaking up at demonstrations, it's being kind to each other. It means that there'll be a healing in our protest. I know that's been my experience, that showing up and standing in front of these military officers that are threatening us, that as we shout back, Stop repeating history, we were surprised that something amazing happened for us. We were having a healing finding the voice that we didn't have back when we were incarcerated and you didn't do all that.

Frank, I think that a lot of people who've never tried to spend I'm with this history or do not have a personal connection to it, in particular, don't know about redress and don't know about the apology, don't know about the restitution payments that were made, don't know about the explicit promises from the US government that this was wrong and we would not do it again. Part of the reason that we wanted to do this podcast and have it take this arc was to tell that story, to try to cement that history in people's minds, that this is something we said we wouldn't do again. Some of the people who said we wouldn't do it again are people who you like. I wonder how you think about the fact of redress and today's activism.

At the time, 1978 to 1988 was a very short window to essentially, again, turn the nation around on the question of the camps being wrong. President Reagan signed the Civil Abilities Act in 1988. We thought at the time That job's done. We've done it. This will never happen again. We've established that in American law and the Constitution. Apparently, America has a shorter memory span. Then we said never again, and now we say never again is now. It's as simple as that.

This is to any of you, because you've all had different roles in different parts of this, and I'd ask you, feel free to avoid this question if you don't want to answer it, or tell me your answer if you do. Should the people who were most personally responsible for conceiving, designing, and implementing this policy be more famous for it? Would we benefit from a country for knowing more specifically and personally about not just the measmic error that was created here there, but the bad actions of specific government officials who pushed it through and made it happen.

A great symbol of that is seeing these guards with their face covered, their stories He's hidden. It evokes the executioner. People are terrified because they have dehumanized not only their victims, but themselves. Naming them, learning about them, and sharing and passing on that information is how we teach the next generation what happens to people when they lose their humanity. That's beautiful. Thank you.

Lauren.

I want to add to something that Frank just said about we wanted reparation so that nothing like this could ever happen again. I think the problem is the definition of this, is people have a very narrow view of what this is. So maybe they're not going to round up 125,000 Japanese Americans again. Check, we're not going to do that again, right? And in fact, just as Robert's in the Trump-Rihawaii decision said, Koreomatsu was wrong the day it was decided, we shouldn't have rounded up 125,000 Japanese Americans. But that's not the it, I think, that we all care about. The it we all care about is really singling out a group of people as suspicious, as dangerous as criminals just because they're Mexican, because they're Japanese, because they're Chinese. It's the singling out of a group. And demonizing them. And demonizing them and scapegoating them. And I think that the problem is this understanding that we're not going to let it happen again.

We want to hear from you guys in the audience, who I know I have some questions for our panel. Before we do that, though, I'm going to take a little bit of a moment of privilege to recognize some of the really important people who are here in the audience tonight. And this is very humbling. Peter Irons is here. You heard Peter's voice in the podcast. Peter and Aiko Hirsi Yosinaga uncovered the documents that proved that the government lied about the origin of the incarceration policy. That led to the quorum no bis strategy that Laurie was part to overturn the convictions of Fred Korematsu and Gordon Hirabayashi and Minisui. I also want to recognize Dale Minami is here with Peter and Aiko's documents in hand. He led the legal team that successfully overturned the Korematsu conviction. I want to also tell you that Fred Korematsu's daughter is here. Karen Korematsu is here with us tonight. It's an to have you here, Karen, from the Manzanar Committee. The co-chair Bruce Embry is here, along with more than a dozen representatives from the Manzanar Committee. Thank you so much, Bruce and the Manzanar Committee, for being here. Thank you.

We have ambassadors here from the Japanese-American National Museum who are here. Thank you so much for all of your work and for being here. We have representatives from Densho who are here, and everybody who's ever done any work in an archive right now knows that Densho are demigods in this area. They do the work of preserving the history of the incarceration policy and the people who lived it and the people who survived it and the people who fought it. Finally, with humility, I want to just take a moment to recognize the survivors and the family members of the survivors of the prison camps who are with us here tonight. If you can stand or raise your hands. We are honored by your presence. We are honored by your presence. We are honored by your presence. In this instance, we are learning from the past what not to do in the future. I think the people are standing up where we didn't do this in the '40s. Hello. Hello. My name is Amber Teas, and I am from Monrovia, California. God bless you. Thank you. I am a history teacher in Los Angeles Unified School district.

The Egl Rock High School. I just want to thank all I love you on stage for all of the work that you're doing. Many of my students and their families are affected by this President's policies on immigration. So thank you for all of your hard work. One of my goals within my classroom is to bring historical perspectives from traditionally marginalized groups throughout history into mainstream history lessons. I use language very intentionally in my classroom. Last year, I read Sharon McMahon's book that included a profile on Norman Moneta and Daniel Inouy, and she used terms like incarceration and imprisonment camps in lieu of the term internment camps. I noticed in this podcast that you did the same, Rachel.

How important is it to use language like that?

Do you think at some point the history books will change to use a more accurate description of those camps? A great question. A great question and beautifully put. Would any of you like to answer that? Satsuki.

So much of the government's effort to hide and distort what they did to us started with the language, the euphemistic language used to minimize the trauma, the ways in which they protected themselves by using words like relocation. I know for myself, when I was writing my own book, I caught myself because I had internalized what the government had said about what happened to us, and then realized that we weren't just removed from our homes, we weren't just placed in horse stals. We were arrested and we were imprisoned. We were behind barbed wire fences. How important it is for students to learn the truth about our experience and the gravity of the distortion of reality that our government led.

If Roger Daniels were here, Professor Roger Daniels, he would point out that internment is a legal term that applies only to the arrest and imprisonment of enemy aliens or any aliens on citizenship. So internment was a term we progressed to in the '70s and '80s when the term back then in polite society was relocation camp. So it was a struggle just to say internment camp, and now we're getting more to proper terminology and calling them incarceration camps.

I was going to say the same thing that internment applies to the imprisonment of citizens of another country with which we're at war. And so using it in terms of the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans is improper, but it's proper with regard to the roundup right after Pearl Harbor of our grandparents, of the immigrants would be properly called internment. And then executive order 9066, we call it incarceration. So it's technical, but it's also respecting the ability of the people to name their own experiences, I think.

Yeah. I've always felt like one of the signs of growing up is becoming intolerant of euphemism. Yeah.

Hi, I am Mary Lee Nambu. This is my husband, Rich Nambu.

We are from Glendora, California, and he's Sancer.

My question is for Dr. Ina. I'm a licensed clinician. I'm here with Rich, my husband, whose parents were both incarcerated. In your work as a psychotherapist, have you discovered clusters of symptoms common in the multi-generation transmission process, unique to internment camp survivor's children? Yes. You know, many times people who are starting to express and identify with the trauma that they suffered, They talk about how their parents didn't talk about the camps and somehow assume that because the parents didn't talk about it, not only did it not affect them, but that it wasn't so bad. The part of the goal of therapy is to help the person identify what is motivating their parents to be so silent. So much anxiety and depression became evident to me as I worked families who said the teenager who was getting into trouble wasn't getting straight A's like all Japanese-Americans should. There was something wrong with him. But I often explain that trauma has a way of getting communicated, mostly non-verbally. My parents lived in great fear after they were released because they were afraid that anything that we might do could put us back in prison again. So much unpredictable because they never committed a crime that justified what happened to them.

The transmission of trauma is really evident in the need to succeed and the threat and danger if you don't. My parents communicated to me on a regular basis, if you get a B, if you get in trouble, the teacher scolds you, if you get a parking ticket, that drastic, horrible things are going to happen in your life. The need to achieve many of the young people that I treated in my practice were young people who were so stressed from the amount of pressure they felt from their parents because it was a dangerous world for my parents. Our need to success was how we were going to save our parents from that anxiety. So I could do a whole another book on it, but I hope that answers your question. Thank you. Hi there. My name is Angel Slamo-Kosky, and I'm from Valencia. It's a humbling experience to be here with all of you people. Thank you.

And Thank you, Peter, for being here.

My question is, burn or order shows that authoritarianism rarely arrives with tanks. It creeps in through paperwork, quiet compliance, and people who don't want to get involved.

Today, what form of societal silence do you see as most dangerous?

And how can we, as citizens, actively really disrupt it before it's too late?

I'm not going to offer any particular remedy, aside from we talked about, talk to your neighbors, be visible, get in the way, don't obey in advance, as Timothy Snyder said. But I think that the quote that I want to pass on is from Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Viet Tan Win, of USA. If you want to know what you would have done or when Japanese Americans were forcibly removed and incarcerated in World War II, now you know. It's what you're doing now.

I would just add, and I'm no expert on these things, I would say that in the news business, one thing that I have noticed that I think is really corrosive is when When the administration puts out statements about people who it has been caught radically mistreating or flagrantly mistreating or mistreating in such a way that it has attracted empathy or attention from other people, they will also always find some way to release some derogatory information about the person who was targeted. You will see in the news business a retraction of interest. It may not be a removal of interest, but you will see it get knocked down a peg in terms of how it's going to be covered. Oh, this person had had a conviction. Oh, this person had a removal order. Oh, this person had any number of things that are completely incommensurate with the treatment that they received that got all of our attention in the first place. There are no perfect victims. There are no perfect victims, and your perfection should not define whether or not we see you as a victim. That makes me itch. It makes me itch at work.

Professor Burnet, did you want to talk about that a lot? That way in on that last question?

I do have to say I'm really heartened by the number of people who are standing up now, who stood up after the treatment of Muslims and persons of Middle Eastern descent after 9/11. I'm heartened by that. I think all that I'm sure you all felt the same way. Felt like people are standing up in ways that people didn't stand up after the incarceration. The lawyers on the front line today just blow my mind that they're doing the really hard work that they're doing. But I also totally agree with the sentiment that we all can do something, all need to do something, that during the incarceration, vast majority just let it happen. We just can't do that. And so the No King's Rally showing up, protesting, writing letters to the editor, having speakers come up. I talk about the Japanese American incarceration a lot because I think a lot of people in this country get that that was wrong. Yes. Some people think it didn't happen, their deniers or whatever, but I think a lot of people get that it's wrong. And so if you can start talking about the Japanese American incarceration and then push the envelope a little bit and talk about ignorance and fear and all of that, people then can get what's happening with immigrants today.

So I think talking about the Japanese-American incarceration is a powerful way of raising consciousness, and I think all three of us agree with that, to your civic organizations, to your church groups, to your kuanas clubs, to your whatever, buy books for elementary schools, all of that. I think there's so many things we can do as individuals.

It starts a moral conversation immediately. It goes right to people's hearts. Lori Binai, Frank Abe, Satsuki Ina. I could not have done any of the work that we did without not just the interviews that we did with you, but also the guidance from you. Thank you, especially for telling us when we were going wrong. Thank you for being here today. You're real American heroes, and I am honored to be with you. Thank you.

We've been talking a lot already tonight about parallels between what happened 80 years ago and in our own time, what is different now. As we mentioned, Dr. Ena, in her interview with us for the podcast, she was very blunt about the fact that there really were not street protests. There was one magazine article that came out in the New Republic months after people had already been in the camps. There was one politician who we covered, Colorado Governor Ralph Kahr, who we highlight in the series. There were the Quakers, the Quaker activists who advocated against it and who also tried to provide comfort and tried to do things that would mitigate the harm that was being caused to these communities. But when I think about the leadership and the lack of protest, what we saw, the absence of protest, the absence of street resistance from non- Japanese Americans who saw what was happening to their neighbors, the absence of courage among elected officials at every level. That is very important for us to understand about how wrong Japanese American incarceration was and how it was able to happen. But it is not exactly the circumstance in which we find ourselves today.

We do now have, just talk about elected leaders, we have some elected leaders who are willing to take a stand. When we see them taking a stand, their motivations are patriotic, they are personal, some Sometimes they are political, but we welcome it all.

Together, we're sending a message to Donald Trump, to Christie Noem, to Gregory Bovino, and anyone else seeking to terrorize our people.

Your divisiveness and your brutality are not welcome here.

We're at the democracy center in Little Tokyo, the sacred site where we were interning and bussing the Japanese.

That's shameful part of our past. And what did the administration do? What did Steven Miller do? What did Donald Trump do? They sent masked men. Immigrants have rights, and we have the right to stand up and push back.

You cannot stop people just because they are brown.

Not in this in this city, not in this country. It's not normal. It's not anywhere close to being normal, and it's rightfully shocked the conscience of all of us. This is an attack on every person in this city and in every city in our country. So hear me Why, President Trump, when I say this, to get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us. This is a racist, bigoted attack on ground-scan people who have an accent.

It has nothing to do about safety.

It has nothing to do about keeping Charlotte safe.

I'm a former immigrant. I'm mayor of this city. The stigmatization of One people in our community throughout the country of Latinos and people of Latino descent is just wrong.

I think it is shameful that this administration makes citizens feel like they have to carry a passport in their own country. No citizen should have to carry a passport in their own country to prove that they're an American.

I'd like to introduce you to a couple of the people who you just saw there, Pasadena's mayor Mayor, Victor Gordo. Thank you for being here, Mr. Mayor. California congressman, Mark Tucano. An activist, Amy Oba of Nican Progressives, who you heard me talk about earlier tonight here in LA. All right, let me give you a little more introduction for each of them. Congressman Taccano's parents and grandparents were all sent to incarceration camps during World War II. After they returned home to Riverside County, Mark Taccano grew up there. He has now represented that district in Congress. We are honored to have him here. Pasadena's mayor, Victor Gordo, moved to Pasadena from Mexico with his parents when he was a kid. If you watched the show on MSNOW called the Rachel Maddo Show, you will recognize him as one of the first public officials we interviewed on the show this year about fighting back against federal agents, including suing ICE to stop their tactics in this city. Specifically, you may also remember the story of Mayor Gordo signing himself up on the spot spontaneously to name himself the lawyer, the personal attorney for one man who had been taken by ICE, whose wife had brought his medication.

She was trying to get his medication to him. He met her at the doors of the ICE facility where they would not let her in and they would not take the medication. He, on the spot, became that man's attorney to try to get into that facility to get him his medication. We are also joined, as I mentioned earlier, by Amy Oba with Niki Progressive. She is a community leader. That his organization is based in Little Tokyo, and Amy's grandparents were incarcerated at Heart Mountain during World War II. She's now an organizer in a rapid response network to help protect her community from the ICE raids in LA. It's fantastic to have all of you here. Amy, let me start with you just to ask you a little bit about what you do, the Nuts and bolts. What are you guys doing on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis?

Yeah, it's quite There's just a group of us that regularly drive around our community. We're looking for ICE activity. We started organizing when Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act earlier this year. We got together at the many community orgs as we could. It helps that Niki Progressive has a lot of people who have been organizing in the Japanese-American community for decades, and we wanted to know what we could do to help. We started with know your rights trainings and bread card distribution. We also formed a rapid response network under Chirula. A little bit later, we adopted safety and peace patrols to when we learned about them from the Harbor Area peace patrols. We worked together with them to draw attention to the fact, like you mentioned earlier, the ICE was staging out of Terminal Island, which was a former Japanese-American community. When we saw what they were doing, we implemented that as well. Yes.

Can you explain a little bit about how the Peace Patrols work, about how that happened, how that works? Yeah, we were just driving in cars.

We're keeping an eye out for ICE. When ICE is in the community, we're letting everybody know. Luckily, we're very connected. We can spread the word quickly, and we want to get on the ground to document and to just alert our community. It really does matter because when people are arrested by ICE, it is like they're kidnapped. They really can just disappear for days, for weeks. Ice won't have them in their system. Sometimes, we know of a family right now, it's been eight weeks, and the family have started to believe that their family member is dead because ICE will not provide any information on where they are, what's happened to them. Even just getting a name so that the family can know and the immigration lawyers can know where to look for people is really helpful.

Do you need more support from the community than you're getting?

We would love more support from the community.

Congressman Tukano, is there continuity between, and this is carrying on from the earlier discussion we had, continuity between what Congress did in the 1980s, right?

The investigation, the apology, the restitution payments, the pledge, the bipartisan unified unanimous pledge that we would never do this again. It feels like there's utter discontinuity between that era in Congress, which was the Reagan era when that happened, and now. Is there a way that Congress can reconnect to that moral clarity of that moment?

Well, we are in a muddy moment, more than muddy. We've seen the same lies being told about Latinos and other immigrants, fear of being whipped up, national security being invoked as the premise for why people's Civil Liberties can be violated. There is a difference, though. I do think there are more people who know the history, not enough people who know the history of Japanese-American internment. I was heartened in the first Trump administration to to hear Laura Bush, the wife of George W Bush, say the separation policy, this reminds me of what happened to Japanese-Americans. So it was a prominent Republican figure. It wasn't enough, but it told me that it had not completely disappeared. More recently, at the Memorial of Norm Moneta, George Bush showed up at the eulogy and talked about how important it was to have Norm Moneta in the cabinet during 9/11. Norm spoke up and said, Mr. President, we cannot repeat what happened to Japanese Americans and my people. It is important that we review this history. I am disappointed that we have a Supreme Court that is highly deferential to executive power. I want to put a... We can hope that these cases win their way through the courts and that they finally overturn Koreimatsu.

But more immediately, we can build a national support for a bill that I introduced, along with my Japanese-American colleagues, in February, as Trump took office, the Korematsu Takai Civil Liberties Act. What the bill does is it prohibits detention or imprisonment based on someone's race, nationality, or any other perceived characteristic. It seems incredible to me. It seems incredible to me that we haven't done this, and that's not the standard of our courts. But we saw Justice Kavanaugh, beyond belief, give license to ICE and everybody else to do racial profiling, which is the connection of the present moment to what happened during World War II. People being denied their liberty based on who they are. And this is not America.

Mayor Gorda, there's fighting back to try to stop what's happening and the type of shield, the type of legal shield that congressman Tukano is talking about. But there's also just helping people who are being hurt. I wanted to ask, how do you think about just mutual aid, just helping communities that right now in many places are in hiding, that are bearing the brunt of what Trump is doing and how that is changing life in Pasadena right now?

It really is. I've experienced living in that fear. As you mentioned, I was born in Zacatecas, Mexico. My parents brought me My parents brought me to Pasadena at age five, and I remember being brought across the border. My grandparents brought me to the border, where I was then brought across to reunite with my parents who had moved here three years before. We lived in a garage. My father was a cook and dishwasher at the same passing a restaurant for 50 years. My My mother was a seamstress, and we lived in the garage, and in that garage, I probably should have brought it, we had a coffee can. I remember the Folgers coffee cans, the big ones, the gallon size. In that coffee can was cash, copies of birth certificates, driver's licenses, and a handwritten list of phone numbers. I knew from age five that if my parents did not come home, that I was to take that coffee can and knock on the neighbor's door and ask for help. It pains me today to see kids. The earlier panelists talked about the impact to kids and kids being harmed, and that's very true. I see it in the kids that I go visit at schools.

I see it in the kids and their parents when I see them at the grocery store. It's had a tremendous emotional impact on Pasadena, and it's had a tremendous economic impact on Pasadena as well. It's no way for anyone to live not in Pasadena, not in this state of California or this country or the world. No one should live in here.

Alleviating that fear is not necessarily a government project, it's a neighborly project. In many cases, a pastoral project.

It's people to people.

Amy, your grandparents were incarcerated during World War II. Does that family history inform the way that you think about this work now?

It does. I also think my community's history informs the way that I worked as well. So when Japanese-Americans were fighting for redress, they weren't fighting alone. We actually had Representative Dimely from the Congressional Black Caucus approach our our community and offer the Congressional Black Caucus's support through Congress for the Bills. He even went as far as to open up his offices in DC and let a giant delegation of Japanese Americans who are trying to lobby for these bills pass. He let them use his offices as their headquarters. And that is the support that we need and that was instrumental in getting those bills passed for us. And so I feel like the Japanese American community has an obligation to stand in solidarity with other communities. And it's something we have done. We've been part of the Civil Rights Movement, the United Arab Farm Workers Movement. Some of the NIKki progressive members were part of the Black Panthers. Yeah. And it's what... It's what drives our solidarity now. We believe that the Latino community right now is where the Japanese-American community was 80 years ago, and it's our turn to be in solidarity. But But I also wanted to say a little bit that my own family history also drives my work.

So my grandparents were both at Heart Mountain, Miami, and that's where they met. They were young lovers. But my grandfather, and There is a little bit of family history discrepancy with this, but my father remembers hearing that my grandfather was a no-no boy. For those of you who don't know, Japanese Americans were given a loyalty questionnaire when they entered the camp, and people who said, No, I will not swear loyalty to the US government, and no, I will not serve in the US military, were called no-no boys. Often, they were separated from their families and interned in a separate prison camp. But my grandfather, and well, I want to say, too, that for Japanese Americans to serve in the US military when their families were in concentration camps at home, that took a certain type of courage and sacrifice.

But... Yes.

But I also think it takes a certain type of courage, like my grandfather, to say no. For him, it was no, the way I'm being treated is not okay, the way my family and community is being treated right now is not okay. I think that's something that we need right now in this moment, for more people to say no, the way the immigrant communities are being treated right now is not okay, and I'm going to do something about it.

There has been a lot of hand wringing over the perception that the protest movement against Trump tends to skew older, that older Americans are leading the resistance while younger people are less involved. I want to say that the person who said, I'm with you. I don't think of it as a bad thing if the resistance movement is being led by the Cotton Tops. I really don't. I feel like you don't mess with America's seniors. I have no problems and no reservations about this at all. But I wanted to ask Mayor Gordo about the nature of the pushback that you were describing in the streets. Then, Amy, afterwards, if you would talk a little bit about whether you feel like young people are engaged in the fight or how you feel about that multi-generational element.

Well, in Pasadena, we did have student groups who led protests. In fact, the initial protest that I attended was one put together by students at John Mere High School in Pasadena. They not only took to the streets themselves to protest, but then they organized their peers and to help to organize, in large part, the large demonstrations. That's what it's going to take. It's going to take people exercising their voice in all age groups. Then the congressman talks about the importance of all levels of government being involved But Pasadena immediately took a step to denounce officially the actions of the Trump administration and ICE. I believe, and I invite other communities, other cities and governmental entities, including school boards, to do the same thing. That's the type of partnership and the battle that we need to put up on all fronts. Amy.

Yeah. I would say that a lot of people in UK Progressive are my age and younger, so it's really fun to work in an intergenerational organization. I have a really good time. But I actually do think the younger folks are pretty involved. I'm thinking about the... Yeah. I'm thinking about the Palestinian encampments that went up all across the nation at college campuses. Students were incredibly organized and incredibly committed. I think it's actually on our political leaders to take the concerns of this generation seriously. Very few people, even Democrats, have been willing to speak out against the genocide happening in Gaza. I think the younger generation has taken note and that political leaders need to work harder to incorporate the concerns of this generation.

Thank you.

Can I just say something about this? So my 70-something aunt and uncle showed up at the protests. They were among the older generation. But I think there's something What else going on here, Rachel. I sit on the higher-ed subcommittee of the Education Workforce Committee, and we've had these fraudulent hearings all year about weaponizing dissent or anti-Semitism on... There is anti-Semitism. I don't want to deny that there's anti-Semitism, but there's a weaponization also in a way that quells dissent on university campuses. And so part of what I think is going on among young people, especially in areas of the country where there should be vigorous dissent and vigorous pushback, is they've watched their peers being suspended from university. They've watched them being arrested, deported because of things they've written. We have to stand up for... We can we can reject anti-Semitism, but stand stand up for... Look, in this book, Stand Up For Institutions, universities are these islands of democratic institutions. We have to protect them. Young people, that's where they are.

The podcast is fantastic. I feel like I'm there with them. I think all of the people that they bring in are wonderful, and I love it. I believe we have some questions from the audience. Is that correct? Yes, it is. Look, the lights came up in just the right way. There's a human there. Yes.

Just enough so I could read my card. My name is Margaret Gabriel. I'm from Aliso Viejo, California. Thank you. Orange County, so I drove up. Really, first, I want to say, really appreciate the MSNOW Live team for coming to the West host.

We're very excited to be here.

My question is for Rachel. In episode 2, you highlight Carl Bendetson as being in a fortuitous position to implement his plan since the man in charge, his boss, was a bafoon. Keyword. As I listened, I swore I sensed a teeny bit of insinuation to two individuals in the current administration. Now, be honest, were you thinking of them when you wrote those words?

I can't quite hear you. We'll just have to move on to the next question. There is a... Yeah, that's not just an archetype. I I think there is a pretty direct analogy there. Listen, I think it's a really interesting political and indeed moral question. When we talked about this a little bit earlier tonight, the idea of infamy. If you do something terrible, should you be forgotten or should you be famous? There's an argument for both of them. I think that the fact that General John DeWitt has, if anybody has taken the fall in history for Japanese-American incarceration as General John DeWitt is deserved, he deserves it. But I do think that the guy who was the brains of the operation is named Carl Bedetson. But I'm ESP communicating to you who I'm thinking of in this moment. It's a pattern that we can see when you've got a guy who in charge who's willing to take the heat and indeed enjoys it and likes his relationship with the press and likes to say things that aren't true that get attention and is happy to be seen as racist and happy to be seen as transgressive, and that's part of how he acts in the world.

That's a great person to hide behind, to effectuate something that is truly nefarious, that comes from the same racist place, but that actually needs a brain to run it. Carl Bendetson ought to be famous. I think that to the extent that the Donald Trumps of the world are going to be retaining their evidence for their accountability in the future, so should the people who work for them as Deputy Whitehouse Chief of Staff. Hypothetically speaking.

It's funny. There's two letters S and M..

We should talk about that later.

My name is Noelle, and I'm from Los Angeles.

Given the obvious similarities between ICE raids and detentions and what happened to Japanese Americans after World War II, what would your panel suggest we, average Americans, do to pressure elected officials to course-correct? And will it be enough? It must be horrible to watch history repeat itself in the darkest ways. Why does America keep repeating this ugly cycle of inhumane treatment of immigrants?

Amy, do you feel like you want to talk to that one?

I can take a stab at it. I don't know about pressure. I think there's a lot of ways to talk to our elected officials, to work with our elected officials, to get protective policies in place. Even just right now, asking that that our current county police departments not share information with ICE, Border Patrol in our midst. That can be really helpful. But I also think everyday people can just get out there and do things. Are you dropping your kids off at school? Do you know that other people who are undocumented might be dropping their kids off and could use the support of a community looking out for ice while that's happening? It doesn't have to be these crazy, heroic things. It's okay to just think about what you could do every week just with a little bit of your time and to do it. Can you call? We have a lot of people who spend time calling detention centers to see when people's visitation slots are for families because they can be on hold for hours. It can take a long time. So even just using your time a little bit or donating to orgs if you don't have a lot of time.

But something you can do consistently, something that you can continue to do yourself, becomes unstable when enough people do that together.

Some elected officials absolutely need to be pressured, and they should be. But people also need to be supported who are making the correct decision. I appreciate Amy's comments because we're really talking about There's the moderate people in the middle that we need to convince to come to the correct side. We're going to do that by educating them, by writing op-ed pieces, by communicating with them directly. We all have people in our lives that we know are teeter tottering, and maybe even in our own families, because we married into them. I think continuing that discourse, let's not make the same mistake that the other side made by demonizing people who maybe have a different opinion that we can persuade, that we can bring to us. Some people will never persuade, but I firmly believe that the correct approach is to try and bring people over who are right-thinking people.

The lessons of history, more than anything, boil down to act in ways that you are proud of now and that your family will be proud of you for generations. That's right. That's part of what we're trying to learn. That's going to do it for us tonight. Thank you all so much for being here. Congressman Mark Tucano, Mayor Gordo. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Mayor. Amy, thank you so much. Thank you to everybody who helped make this happen. Thank you to Mike Jarvis, Kelsey Desideria, Jen Mulreoney, Donovan, and everybody at MSNOW who made this podcast possible. Thank you to all our interviewees. Los Angeles, you've been amazing. Good night.