The New York Times reports:

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.

The federal government’s current efforts have focused on arresting and deporting Latinos who don’t have legal status in the United States. That contrasts with the situation in the 1940s, when most of the Japanese Americans held in detention camps were U.S. citizens.

But to many Japanese Americans, the images of uniformed federal agents ushering people onto buses, the mass detentions and the dehumanizing language used by government officials stir collective memories of the trauma faced by their own parents and grandparents.

Lisa Doi, 34, a board member of the Japanese American Citizens League’s chapter in Chicago, said that people who showed up to a recent event to connect community members with local rapid response networks were already seeing the parallels.

“I think the thing people most appreciated was having next steps,” she said.

Japanese Americans tend to support Democrats at the polls and did so in the 2024 election, according to AAPI Data, a research organization focused on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. But this year, some have taken more concrete action to oppose the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Japanese American groups have filed an amicus brief contesting President Trump’s recent invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, a law that was also used to justify the imprisonment of Japanese Americans. They have denounced as a disgrace the government’s mass detention of immigrants at Fort Bliss, a former internment camp for Japanese Americans in Texas. [Continue reading…]