Fighting Dhs Immigration Raids

Floor Speech

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Ms. TOKUDA. Mr. Speaker, 80 years ago, over 120,000 Japanese individuals were stripped of their rights and forced into barbed-wire camps because of the way they looked and the language they spoke.

My great-grandfather, my GG, was one of them. He was taken from his home on Maui and imprisoned not for anything that he had done but for who he was. We said then, ``never again.'' Yet, here we are today.

Now, the very sites where Japanese-American families were incarcerated have been reopened. Fort Bliss, a World War II internment camp, is now the Nation's largest immigrant detention center.

To add insult to injury, the Trump administration is using the same law, the Alien Enemies Act that was once used to imprison Japanese Americans, to detain and fast track deportations, with zero due process rights.

While this administration insists it is targeting dangerous criminals, we know that more than 73 percent of those in ICE custody have no criminal convictions at all.

This administration is also intentionally dismantling legal pathways and stripping people of lawful status so they can be deported. We just saw this on Kauai recently, where a raid that swept up 44 people ended with six Venezuelan men--who were legally here seeking asylum--self- deporting after the administration revoked temporary protected status for their country. To anyone who thinks this could never happen to me, consider this: Two-thirds of the Japanese imprisoned in camps were American citizens. Their children, like my grandfather, serving in the United States military in defense of a country who saw them as the enemy.

Today, American citizens are also being rounded up, once again, stopped and detained, simply for the way they look, by officers who face no accountability. United States military veterans are being picked up, detained, and deported.

What we are witnessing is a slow methodical erosion of citizens' rights and a cold indifference towards treating entire communities as national security threats.

We are in the midst of history in the making, and history has already shown us the dangers of what this country can do when given unchecked, unfettered immigration authorities.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues on all sides of the aisle: How much are we willing to tolerate before we say enough is enough?

Eighty years later, this Nation still reflects with shame at what it did to our Japanese-American families. We apologized. We vowed to learn. We vowed to do better, and we have failed.

``Never again.'' ``Nidoto nai.''

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