This congressman’s family was swept up in WWII Japanese detention. He sees a repeat in today’s raids

WASHINGTON– The congressman returned home last July 4 to hear surprising stories in Southern California as immigration patrols swept through communities and a constituent told him he had started carrying a passport as proof of his right to be in the country.

Rep. Mark Takano, whose American-born parents were both incarcerated as young children with their families during the forced resettlement of Japanese Americans during World War II, couldn’t help but see the parallels between that chapter of American history and this one.

“I feel like there is a similarity in the circumstances where my own 2-year-old father and 1-year-old mother are labeled as enemy aliens and are considered a danger to national security,” he told The Associated Press in an interview.

“They are sent to these incarceration camps,” he said. “Similar arguments have been made by this administration that immigrants pose a grave danger to our country and that it is for the security of our country that we do this.”

President Donald Trump’s campaign promise of the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history is at an inflection point. Americans are seeing what it looks like to round up, detain and deport thousands of people, especially in the wake of the deaths this year of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, U.S. citizens protesting the actions in Minneapolis.

The White House has changed the direction of the Department of Homeland Security by reframing its approach. New Secretary Markwayne Mullin has promised to keep the department out of the headlines.

But Trump is also facing growing pressure from conservative groups not to let go of his goal of deporting 1 million people a year. The president’s Republican allies in Congress are fueling immigration and deportation efforts with billions of dollars in special funds.

Takano, a top Democrat on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, drew on his own family history — and the country’s eventual redress to Japanese Americans who were detained — to challenge Trump’s approach.

“We view this time in history as a shameful time, as a time when our political leaders failed to uphold the Constitution and failed the American people,” he said.

A former high school history teacher before being elected to Congress in 2012, Takano grew up in Southern California and learned to understand family histories.

His grandfather Isao Takano came to the United States from Hiroshima and married Kazue Takahashi, a United States-born citizen. Together they settled in Bellevue, Washington, and started a business growing tomatoes, strawberries, and chrysanthemums for the Seattle market.

When the United States entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they were among an estimated 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, immigrants, and people born in the United States who were forcibly displaced.

His father, William, was 2 years old when his family was sent in 1942 to the Tule Lake incarceration camp in California. Her mother, Nancy Tsugiye Sakamoto, born in California to American-born parents, was one year old when she was transferred to the Heart Mountain Detention Center in Wyoming.

Then as now, he says, people are dragged into anti-immigrant detentions.

“Will Americans visit Alligator Alcatraz in a few generations and ask: How could our government do this? Takano said during a speech on the House floor, referring to the Trump-era immigration detention center in Florida.

“These future generations of Americans will look to us, the Congress, to see what we did to try to stop this.”

Takano remembers his father taking him to see the land the family once owned. He learned about his great-uncles who served in the Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team made up of Japanese American soldiers; one was killed in action in Italy. He remembers his own father later collecting donations for the national reparations campaign.

In 1988, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, which sought to apologize for the “grave injustice” that had been committed and award $20,000 to each person detained. Republican President Ronald Reagan signed it.

Takano’s parents were among those who received a letter of apology from the federal government, he said, as well as a payment.

Talks are underway among some members of Congress, he said, to seek similar relief for people whose car windows were smashed, their homes searched and their livelihoods upended under Trump’s immigration enforcement operations.

“It is remarkable that the country has realized its mistake,” he said. “I believe we are living in one of those times of error and I believe we can emerge from this moment stronger.”