Rewriting History

Floor Speech

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Ms. TOKUDA. Mr. Speaker, on a hilltop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, there is an interpretive plaque on a boulder. It stands where the government locked up thousands of Japanese as so-called enemy aliens.

My great-grandfather, my GG, was one of them. He was locked behind barbed wire while his son, my grandfather, joined the Military Intelligence Service in service to a country that saw him as the enemy. That small stone marker is all that remains to tell their story.

Today, the Trump administration is removing national park signage that tells the truth about slavery, the genocide of indigenous Americans, and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.

In Nazi Germany, it started with burning books. In the USSR, they erased people from photographs. In North Korea, they deleted political leaders from online archives. Today, in the United States, quite ironically, the Trump administration calls it removing negative information about past or living Americans.

What happens when they decide the story of my GG is too negative to remember? What happens when they want to whitewash history and remove the service and sacrifice of our communities of color?

In March 2025, the U.S. Army removed its web page honoring the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the all-nisei unit that became one of the most decorated in American military history.

That is not a simple edit. It is not an accident. It is not an oversight. It was an intentional action by this administration to push a revisionist history of American history, scrubbing away one plaque, one web page, one sign, one sentence at a time.

Mr. Speaker, five incarceration sites are now part of the National Park System. They are Manzanar in California, Minidoka in Idaho, Tule Lake in California, Amache in Colorado, and Honouliuli in Hawaii. Across the country, a dozen federally recognized landmarks and museums preserve this history, our history, from Heart Mountain to Topaz to Santa Fe. Are they next? Will the truth be rewritten or, worse, completely erased?

History is not just decor for a museum exhibit or a national park. It is a warning label for the same injustices we are now seeing repeated today. We see it in the targeting of immigrants. We see it in the dismantling of civil rights protections. We see it in efforts to attack birthright citizenship. We see it when they invoke legal powers that once falsely justified locking up over 120,000 Japanese Americans.

Looking back, what would have changed if someone had just stepped in, if the books had been saved, the pictures restored, the stories preserved, and the truth protected? That is the choice before us now.

We are the truthtellers. We are the truthkeepers. It is on us to truly be the keepers of this history and to make sure that the truth is known and cannot be forgotten.

We have the chance to make this the moment when someone did step in, when someone did say not again. The question isn't whether history will repeat itself. The question is: Will we let it?

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