Asian Americans Advancing Justice Calls Out Similarities of Border Crisis to Japanese American Incarceration
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Washington, DC – June 25, 2018 – In another dehumanizing and disturbing move from the Trump Administration, officials have been touring an Arkansas site near a former Japanese American incarceration camp as a potential facility to incarcerate some of the more than 2,300 children who were separated from their families at the border. The Rohwer Relocation Center was one of two locations in Arkansas that was used to incarcerate Japanese American citizens during World War II, a shameful moment in American history.
Asian Americans Advancing Justice, an affiliation of five civil rights organizations, issues the following statement:
“This administration is yet again on the wrong side of history. Families belong together in their communities, not in cages.
The administration is using fear mongering rhetoric to wrongly persecute these families and terrorize their young children. For Asian Americans, particularly for the Japanese American community, this is all too familiar and painful. Japanese Americans who were incarcerated have experienced trauma that has lasted for generations.
It is shameful and immoral for the government to ignore history, imprison children who seek asylum in the United States, and seek to lock them up near former Japanese American incarceration sites.
Despite Trump's attempt to clean up his manufactured crisis, the fact that the administration is looking for more locations to keep children in jail and continuing to treat families cruelly and inhumanely proves this administration lacks a moral compass. We will fight against unjust incarceration and deportations of all of the immigrant communities that we serve.
We demand the Trump Administration stop looking for more detention facilities and instead reunite the children who have been separated from their loved ones, provide a meaningful opportunity for them to apply for asylum, and treat immigrant families with dignity.”