Americans of Japanese heritage say they see unsettling parallels between their families’ World War II internment and the Trump administration’s latest immigrant detention site.
Homeland Security officials argue that President Donald Trump’s mass deportation initiative requires more detention facilities to hold individuals between arrest and removal. To meet this demand, the administration has partnered with the U.S. military and private contractors, establishing what is now the nation’s largest immigrant detention site at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas.
For many Japanese American families, Fort Bliss carries historical weight. Descendants of those once imprisoned in wartime detention camps are voicing concern about the choice of location and the expansion of detention centers on U.S. military bases.
Fort Bliss itself was part of the internment system during World War II. “It was a cog in the United States Japanese internment machine,” said Brian Niiya, historian and content director at Densho, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the history of Japanese American incarceration. His grandfather, who worked as managing editor of a Japanese-language newspaper, was arrested on Dec. 7, 1941 — the day of the Pearl Harbor attack — and cycled through six different camps over the next two years.
“It’s important to look to this past to try to understand what’s happening in the present, and what the end results could be,” Niiya said.
DHS: Detaining the ‘worst of the worst’
The new Fort Bliss facility, known locally as Camp East Montana, looks like a sprawling white tent city on the desert plains. Built for $1.2 billion, the camp can hold up to 5,000 detainees. As of mid-August, about 1,000 men were being held there, according to U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Democrat representing El Paso.
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, rejected comparisons to Japanese internment camps, calling them “deranged and lazy.”
“The facts are ICE is targeting the worst of the worst – including murderers, MS-13 gang members, pedophiles and rapists,” she said.
But a Cato Institute analysis of government data in June painted a different picture, showing that ICE was arresting four times more noncriminals each week than individuals with convictions. ICE’s own records showed that nearly half of the 59,000 people in custody at the time had no criminal record or charges.
For advocates like Mike Ishii, co-founder of Tsuru for Solidarity, the echoes of history are unmistakable. “This administration is coming in and removing people from their homes, from their workplaces, often with no explanations,” he said. Ishii’s family was once confined at the Minidoka concentration camp in Idaho. “In 1941, it was frightening. Right now, it’s also frightening.”
‘No accounts of wrongdoing’
During World War II, Fort Bliss confined dozens of people the government labeled as “alien enemies,” including Japanese immigrants as well as smaller groups from Germany and Italy. Records compiled by Ireizō, a nonprofit database, show at least 113 first-generation Japanese Americans were sent to Bliss before being transferred elsewhere.
Most were never accused of crimes. “There were no accounts of wrongdoing other than being seen as ‘enemy aliens,’” said Karen Umemoto, director of the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA.
The detentions stemmed from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. The law allowed the government to imprison immigrants and seize their property after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
President Trump invoked the same law this year to designate certain immigrants as “alien enemies” and fast-track deportations, though the Supreme Court has blocked parts of the effort.
Fort Bliss also played a role in recent years under the Biden administration. In 2021, the site was used to house unaccompanied children who crossed the border. The facility, operated by a private contractor, processed minors for entry into the United States rather than deportation. Still, reports of unsafe conditions led survivors and descendants of Japanese internment to protest there. A 2022 federal report later documented problems with child safety and case management.
Asked about Fort Bliss’s internment history, Pentagon officials pointed to an Aug. 7 news briefing in which spokeswoman Kingsley Wilson described it as “the largest federal detention center in history for this critical mission, the deportation of illegal aliens.”
Learning lessons from history
By late August, activity around the Fort Bliss camp was steady, with construction and transport vehicles moving in and out under a bright desert sky. Signs warned drivers that vehicles could be searched and banned cameras and cellphones, but there was no marker identifying the facility.
As Niiya reflected, “We used to say that knowing history was the key to preventing things like this from happening again. Perhaps we can’t say that anymore.”
