Jonathan P. Baird

It has become routine to watch White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller call immigrants “monsters”. Miller is a professional name-caller. It is like he thinks the name-calling gives him permission to void other humans’ constitutional rights and sentence them. Miller did it again in his comments about the Venezuelan migrants who were wrongfully deported to CECOT prison in El Salvador. He said, “..these are monsters who got exactly what they deserved”.

The great majority of the 240 Venezuelan men deported to El Salvador had no criminal record and had violated only immigration laws. They were deported and sent to be tortured at one of the worst prisons in the world without trials, convictions or any due process. In the 60 Minutes episode that CBS spiked, Luis Munto Pinto, a Venezuelan college student who had legally sought asylum in the U.S., described how he had never gotten even a traffic ticket. He had spent six months in custody before he was deported.

The experience of the Venezualan deportees and others arrested by ICE is reminiscent of what happened to Japanese-Americans in 1942. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, fear gripped America. Demagogues came forward, making racist arguments against Japanese-Americans and questioning their loyalty.

Then Japanese-Americans were singled out for mass removal and deportation based entirely on their race. Now Latinos are being targeted for their race. In both cases, people were dehumanized by America’s leaders as a way to justify mistreatment. We are not putting people into concentration camps on the scale done during the Japanese-American internment but ICE is now terrorizing communities all over the U.S. On NPR on Christmas morning, they said 65,000 people are currently being held (the largest number ever) and we know that ICE has the money for large expansion of its operations.

People are being abducted, pulled from vans, cars, work sites, and homes and being disappeared. ICE’s actions are lawless, more consistent with a fascist regime than a democracy. Many immigrants are afraid to leave their homes and this goes far beyond the undocumented. The Trump regime has been going after anyone with a brown skin who looks like they might be an immigrant and the U.S. Supreme Court has let them even though lower courts have objected.

In her new podcast Burn Order, Rachel Maddow documents parallels to our past and revisits the Japanese American internment. Maddow showed how the government invoked the Alien Enemies Act to arrest citizens of the countries we were fighting. That is the same law Trump has invoked even though we are not at war. At that time Japanese-Americans were barred from applying for naturalized U.S. citizenship.

The U.S. government placed two men, Gen. John DeWitt and Karl Bendetsen, in charge of the Army’s Western Defense Command. Both were racists and they devised the program of forced removal and imprisonment. DeWitt didn’t want African-American soldiers under his command and he was opposed to Asian-Americans serving in the military, even in segregated units. DeWitt said:

“ The Japanese, I have no confidence in their loyalty whatsoever. I am speaking now of the native-born Japanese (by which he means U.S.-born American citizens)…A Jap’s a Jap.”

Bendetsen held similar views, stating:

“The Japanese race is an enemy race. Racial affinities are not severed by immigration…The vast majority of those who have studied the Oriental mind assert that a substantial majority of Nisei bear allegiance to Japan and will engage in organized sabotage.”

Maddow shows how others in the government had real intelligence about Japanese-American communities on the West Coast. She cites one man, Naval Intelligence Officer, Ken Ringle, who spoke Japanese and who had immersed himself in Japanese-American communities. Contrary to the views of DeWitt and Bendetsen, Ringle found Japanese-Americans were intensely loyal to America.

Ringle tried unsuccessfully to reach Bendetsen and other government officials. He then wrote a formal report in which he argued the Japanese problem “has been magnified out of its true proportion, largely because of the physical characteristics of the people”. Ringle wrote that mass incarceration was ’not only unwarranted but very unwise”.

But Ringle did not win out. He had some support in the Department of Justice but the Attorney General Francis Biddle went along with Bendetsen and President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. As a result, an estimated 120,000 Japanese-Americans were incarcerated and held until 1944-45. They lost all their property and freedom without trial.

Bendetsen wanted to strip citizenship from Japanese Americans who were born in the U.S. but he could not do it because of birthright citizenship (sound familiar). To avoid that likely losing issue, the military got a legal opinion in February 1942 saying it was constitutional to round up and lock up U.S. citizens on the basis of nothing other than their race. There always seem to be amoral lawyers who will say anything as long as they are paid.

The government moved Japanese-Americans into horse stalls at Santa Anita racetrack. There was hay, horse urine, and horse feces in the stalls which had not been cleaned and prepped to be living quarters. People were initially housed there behind barbed wire and armed guards for six months until they were sent to permanent government camps in places like Arkansas, Utah and Wyoming.

Not all states went along. Maddow tells how Ralph Carr, a conservative Republican governor of Colorado heroically opposed the Japanese American internment. He was a lone voice and it cost him elected office. Gov. Carr welcomed Japanese Americans to come to Colorado in complete contradiction to the federal government policy. Japanese-Americans streamed into Colorado. Carr’s story is remarkable and should be much better known because he almost alone had the courage to go against the tide.

While the U.S. Supreme Court did the wrong thing in its infamous Korematsu decision and upheld the internment, Maddow shows how the efforts of ordinary citizens led to ultimate repudiation of that decision and recognition of its racist underpinnings.

Learning from that experience, Americans must do everything in our power to oppose ICE now and tell them to get the hell out of our communities. America doesn’t need a racist repeat of where it went horribly wrong 83 years ago.