San José Japantown Coalition Rallies Against ICE Facility in Gilroy
A Japanese American-led coalition of residents, elected officials and faith leaders is speaking out against the Trump administration’s deadly immigration enforcement campaign and opposing a planned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in Santa Clara County.
Members of the group said Wednesday the actions against immigrants and their families playing out in the nation today reflect the racist, white supremacist and unjust policies of the past, including when Japanese Americans were incarcerated based on their race during World War II.
“When you see your government begin to sort human beings into categories of who deserves rights and who doesn’t, who gets due process and who doesn’t, you do not stay quiet,” Rev. John Oda of the Wesley United Methodist Church said at a rally in San José’s Japantown.
His uncle fought and died for the United States during the war, while his family was locked away at the Heart Mountain American concentration camp in Wyoming, Oda said.
“You especially do not stay quiet when you have been taught via painful history exactly where that road leads,” he said.
Susan Hayase helped advance the movement for redress and reparations for Japanese Americans in the 1970s and 1980s, and co-founded San José Nikkei Resisters, a social justice organization.
“One of the things that former incarcerees like my parents’ generation and older told us is that they wanted to make sure that it would never happen to anybody else. And we took that as kind of a mission statement, kind of a command that was so important to us,” Hayase said in an interview.
That history is a driving force behind the group’s demand to stop the ICE office and detention facility being planned and built in South Santa Clara County, just outside Gilroy city limits.
The county and Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office filed a lawsuit against ICE in June aiming to stop the center from advancing, saying it was illegally being developed in secret, skipping over environmental and intergovernmental cooperation laws and regulations.
The federal agency has not offered much detail about its facility, saying earlier this year it was planning an office at the location and that it would support its work in the state and country.
The lawsuit alleges the facility at 7240 Holsclaw Road is planned to be nearly 19,000 square feet, and capable of holding roughly 150 people.
During the rally on Wednesday, Hayase said she feels “righteous anger” at what she views as the cruelty being inflicted at mass scale across the nation. Around 400,000 people have been detained by ICE since President Donald Trump began his second term, with widespread reports of poor conditions in detention facilities, more than 50 in-custody deaths and a growing number of fatal shootings in the street by federal agents, she said.
“We hoped that by illuminating our history, we could inspire people to make sure that it never happened again. But today, unfortunately, it’s too late to just say never again. The thing we feared is happening again now,” she said.
The groups were joined by elected officials from local, county, state and federal offices, including Rep. Zoe Lofgren, State Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, Assemblymembers Ash Kalra and Patrick Ahrens, Santa Clara County Supervisor Betty Duong and San José City Councilmember Anthony Tordillos.
“ICE is out of control. It needs to be rebuilt from top to bottom. We have dangerous, masked, armed men snatching people who’ve lived here for years and disappearing them off the streets,” Lofgren said.
“And if that detention center is opened…what it’s going to mean is that those masked, armed, dangerous agents can fan out across Northern California and bring their reign of terror to our communities. We cannot allow that to happen,” she said.
In recent court filings, ICE agreed to voluntarily hold off on further construction of the facility as part of a scheduling compromise with attorneys for Santa Clara County and the Attorney General’s office.
The county and the state are also asking a judge for a preliminary injunction to halt the project indefinitely while the long-term litigation plays out.
The federal court hearing addressing the preliminary injunction is set for Sept. 8.
Lofgren expressed hope the lawsuit will prevail, but added that “we need to stand ready to do what else is necessary should those efforts fail.”
Hayase said she is very hopeful rallies and community-led actions will make real change, and she hopes others are inspired to take up such work, even if they haven’t been directly affected by the current policies.
“Sometimes people get used to bad news. They become calloused. But I think deep down inside, nobody wants violations of human rights to be happening in the United States,” she said.
“To make this system work, everybody has to participate,” she said. “You have to stand up for your own rights. But if you see somebody else’s rights being violated, you have to participate. And I think people aren’t used to that, but I think they can get used to it.”