Bay Area Japanese Americans Draw on WWII Trauma to Resist Deportation Threats

Sadako Kashiwagi is haunted by the memory of her family scrambling to leave their home as her father discarded books.

“We could take only what we could carry. And I remember him pitching his books — he loved his books — into the fireplace because it had Japanese written on it,” said Kashiwagi, who was 8 when the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service attacked Pearl Harbor.

The surprise bombing launched the United States into World War II. Beginning in December 1941, the U.S. government used the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to authorize the immediate imprisonment of Japanese nationals, claiming that wartime incarceration was necessary to prevent sabotage and spying.

The law was used alongside Executive Order 9066 to force the removal and relocation of an estimated 120,000 people of Japanese descent. Most of those incarcerated under the executive order were American citizens.

Under the Alien Enemies Act, a president can authorize the arrest, relocation or deportation of any citizen of a foreign country deemed an enemy. In addition to World War II, it has been used two other times in American history: the War of 1812 and World War I.

It could soon be used for massive deportation operations.

On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump vowed to use the centuries-old law to expedite the removal of undocumented migrants. During his inaugural speech on Monday, he said the obscure law would be used to target drug cartels.

“And by invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, I will direct our government to use the full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement to eliminate the presence of all foreign gang criminal networks, bringing devastating crime to U.S. soil, including our cities and inner cities,” he said.

Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has mobilized Japanese Americans in the Bay Area. They are forming a multigenerational resistance effort that includes building solidarity efforts with ally organizations, planning rapid response teams and doubling down on a campaign to educate the public about their community’s incarceration history.

“This brings back all kinds of memories, even tears,” said Kashiwagi, a 91-year-old Berkeley resident. “You don’t think I’d remember much, but it’s amazing how much I do remember.”

One week before Inauguration Day, Kashiwagi and a group of Japanese American seniors gathered at J-Sei, a cultural center in Emeryville, to share musubis, baked goods and fruit — and discuss ways to prevent history from repeating. Since 2017, the group, mostly in their 80s and 90s, has met monthly as part of Let’s Talk.

Many, like Kashiwagi, are survivors of World War II incarceration.

As usual, they shared their families’ prison camp stories and the lasting impacts of family separations and detention.

Albany resident Geri Handa’s family, like many other families of Japanese ancestry, was separated during the war. She said family separation is relatable.

“That parents will be separated from their children, or they have to make the difficult decision of having to leave here and go back to Mexico, or wherever it may be, and start again,” Handa, 76, said.

Let’s Talk is led by Satsuki Ina, who was born at the Tule Lake Segregation Center, which was near the Oregon border and the largest of the 10 relocation camps.

In 2019, she co-founded Tsuru for Solidarity, a Japanese American social justice advocacy group that works to end immigrant detention sites and support communities targeted by anti-immigration policies. The group started holding protests outside of immigrant detention centers during Trump’s first term.

The group, along with other Japanese American community advocates and organizers, has been vocal about the parallels between current-day anti-immigration rhetoric and wartime incarceration.

According to Ina, the incarceration of Japanese families burdened the community with long-lasting intergenerational trauma, something she specializes in as a licensed psychotherapist. A central part of her community work is helping Japanese American elders feel safe enough to unearth their family’s stories of detention, long a source of quiet shame.

Ina has published a memoir about her family’s survival. Her mother was photographed waiting in line for a registration number by the famous documentary photographer Dorothea Lange.

“We’ve done many things to now get the fourth and fifth generation [of Japanese Americans] to recognize that there have been long-term impacts and that they have a stake in stopping the same injustice that was perpetrated against us back then,” said Ina, 80.

Carl Takei, a lawyer and program director of civil liberties and community safety at the Asian Law Caucus, a San Francisco-based legal nonprofit organization, said the Alien Enemies Act spurred the vilification of Japanese immigrants like his great-grandfather.

“The Alien Enemies Act was used to target the Issei generation, the immigrant generation, who had come to the United States and raised families here,” Takei said. “It creates specific authority, under certain circumstances, to detain and deport people who are designated alien enemies based purely on their ancestry in the country that they were born in.”

A paper published in October by the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy institute in New York, warned that the Alien Enemies Act is “an authority that permits summarily detaining and deporting civilians merely on the basis of their ancestry.” The paper argues that repealing the act “is crucial to preventing presidential overreach” and “ancestry-based internment and expulsion in the future.”

Repeated attempts to repeal it by civil rights groups and Democratic politicians have been unsuccessful. South Bay congressman Mike Honda introduced a bill in 2010 that stalled. In recent years, he has supported efforts by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minnesota) and Sen. Mazie Hirano (D–Hawaii), though their bill hasn’t gained traction.

The Alien Enemies Act has only been used in the context of declared wars, but Takei said it is also permissible to use in the event of “any invasion or predatory incursion” against the United States. Legal experts told KQED that if it is invoked, it would be challenged in court.

“A lot of this is centered around [Trump’s] rhetoric, where he talks about people coming to the United States — to build a better life here — as being invaders,” Takei said. “Whether or not it is a legally valid way of invoking the act, it certainly relies on the language of the Alien Enemy Act.”

Gabriel “Jack” Chin, a law professor at UC Davis, believes Trump’s reference to the Alien Enemies Act is a strategic move to rally his anti-immigration supporters.

“If you are trying to sell the message that immigrants are coming here and stealing your jobs or immigrants are coming here and eating your pets — if you’re trying to wave the bloody shirt, then it’s a good title to get people riled up,” he said. “The argument that we’re being invaded and we need to take war-like measures to respond seems to be the point.”

The inflammatory rhetoric has stirred strong emotions among many Japanese Americans, including Berkeley resident Alan Maeda. At Let’s Talk, he shared that learning more than half the country voted for such divisiveness left him fearful.

“I feel unsafe with people that don’t look like me,” Maeda, 77, said, as tears formed at the corner of his eyes.

Maeda’s grandfather was relocated because he was a religious leader. During his incarceration, his son — Maeda’s father — fought in the 100th Infantry Battalion, the first Japanese American soldiers to fight in World War II.

“It’s like dad had to prove himself, but that’s not enough,” Maeda said.

Japanese elders, who have stepped out of their comfort zones to speak up and protest during the late stages of their lives, have inspired young people such as KC Mukai, a Yonsei or fourth-generation Japanese American. Mukai, a volunteer with Tsuru for Solidarity, is also co-chair of the Japanese American Youth Alliance, which works to empower and unite young Japanese Americans in Northern California.

“Our Bay Area hub has been hard at work, leaning into education and activation of our community here,” Mukai said. “We really want to rally all Japanese Americans to come together and educate themselves on know-your-rights training, how to be a sanctuary people or a sanctuary organization, and start really thinking about our role in this.”

Mukai is helping plan the National Japanese American Historical Society’s 2025 Bay Area Day of Remembrance event, the annual commemoration of World War II incarceration. Each year, the event takes place at the AMC Kabuki 8 theater in San Francisco’s Japantown, and this year’s theme is “Carrying the Light for Justice: Neighbors Not Enemies.”

Jeffery Matsuoka, chair of the event’s organizing committee, said the theme is a direct response to Trump’s threat to invoke the Alien Enemies Act.

“We wanted to play off of that, to indicate that immigrants are not our enemies … they’re our neighbors who are embedded throughout our society,” Matsuoka said. “The great majority of immigrants are trying to seek a better life, as did our ancestors who came from Japan.”

Takei believes the demonization of immigrants is an American tradition that needs to be challenged.

“If we bend to this kind of xenophobic rhetoric — if we accept it — then it means that any ethnic group is at risk,” he said.

Tsuru for Solidarity is working with Latinx, Black and Indigenous community groups to prepare in case there’s an immediate call to action. In response to Trump’s day-one executive orders, group members are coordinating with local counties to ensure rapid response systems are in place. They are also offering their homes as safe spaces for undocumented immigrants during ICE raids and holding resiliency training to provide mental health strategies for activists and organizers.

In March, Tsuru for Solidarity and the Japanese Community Youth Council will host a gathering in San Francisco’s Japantown to equip Japanese Americans with concrete strategies to protect vulnerable immigrants.

“We’re talking about connecting with people ahead of time so that …if we need a rapid response, we already have an established communication process,” Ina said. “What often happens is the administration makes efforts to divide us and to work against each other.”

Tsuru for Solidarity is also working with other Bay Area organizations, including the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants and New Light Wellness.

“When we started, we lit the flame, and the flame’s been burning since,” Ina said, recalling Trump’s first administration when many Japanese Americans were reluctant to protest because of cultural taboos. “When us old folk showed up with our canes and hearing aids and walkers and all of our necessary equipment that drew the press, it gave us an opportunity to say why this is so important.”

For the past couple of years, Kashiwagi, a former librarian, has visited students at Oakland’s Roosevelt Middle School to share her family’s history. She told KQED that being vulnerable and telling her family’s incarceration story in public isn’t easy, but she wants to continue her family’s legacy of activism.

During a recent visit to her Berkeley home, Kashiwagi walked carefully with a cane. She carries emotional and physical scars from being incarcerated. To prove it, she pulled up her shirt sleeve, revealing a scar on her wrist. It’s a reminder of when her hand accidentally went through a window while she played with her brothers during recess at Tule Lake.

She received 20 stitches.

“I look at it and I say, ‘Well, you know, don’t tell me I didn’t go to camp. I have proof that I did,’” she said.

Kashiwagi said it didn’t hurt much when she injured her wrist as a child but that her scar has become oddly sensitive.

“It’s starting to itch, and it just hurts through here,” she said, tracing the white lines against the paper-thin skin of her wrist.

“Here we go again,” she muttered. “Here we go again.”