Satsuki Ina on Ending the Alien Enemies Act
Photos of my father and other Japanese Americans brutalized in the Tule Lake Segregation Center in 1945 chillingly resonate with the treatment of Venezuelans by the U.S. government today. Invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 parallels our own history of state violence. To heal from community trauma, we must tell the truth and not obscure violence and repression.
My newlywed parents Shizuko and Itaru found themselves living a nightmare in 1941. Shizuko was pregnant with their first child when war with Japan intensified the enmity and race hatred directed at people who looked like the enemy.
Initially, they believed birthright citizenship protected them from raids taking place in their neighborhood where FBI agents, fortified by the AEA, entered homes without warrants and arrested immigrant community leaders.
Within months, Itaru and Shizuko, like 125,000 other Japanese Americans, were loaded onto buses and placed in indefinite detention in the Tanforan Racetrack. Suffering from severe morning sickness, my mother feared for the life of my brother Kiyoshi, who was born in the Topaz, UT, prison camp. I was born in the Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum security prison in Northern CA.
Despair filled the pages of my mother’s diary after years of our indefinite detention. Under duress, my parents were coerced to renounce their U.S. citizenship. With the stroke of a pen, they were designated “enemy aliens” subject to detention in Army-controlled internment camps and slated for deportation.
In Tule Lake, my father gave a speech urging fellow inmates to oppose drafting young men inside the prison to fight in the war in Europe. He was charged with sedition. In the Tule Lake jail, he was brutally beaten, separated from us and sent to the Ft. Lincoln internment camp in Bismarck, ND, until the end of the war.
Today, I’m outraged by the weaponization of the AEA against immigrants and by images of Venezuelan immigrants enduring familiar violence by the U.S. government. Their treatment resonates with the trauma of my parents’ torturous and unjust treatment by racist, inhumane government leaders.
We must stand together and demand an end to the Alien Enemies Act! – Satsuki Ina | tsuruforsolidarity | Tsuru for Solidarity
