JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
When the Trump administration opened an ICE detention center at Fort Bliss in Texas late last month, it prompted sharp criticism from Japanese American advocates, and that's because Fort Bliss was one of the military bases where the U.S. government imprisoned people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. And to survivors of Japanese incarceration, Trump's immigration enforcement efforts feel painfully familiar.
MARY MURAKAMI: There's so many parallels. It's unbelievable.
SUMMERS: Mary Murakami was born in 1927. She and her family were imprisoned at the Topaz internment camp in Utah for three years. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Murakami was 14 years old. She recalls how quiet the streets of San Francisco's Japanese town were that evening.
MURAKAMI: And when all of us kids looked out the window, we saw the U.S. Army from one curb to the other curb, and they were all pointing their guns towards us.
SUMMERS: The U.S. declared war on Japan the next day. In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. It authorized the forced relocation and imprisonment of people the U.S. government claimed were threats to national security.
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MURAKAMI: We were no longer citizens of this country. It called our parents aliens, which was true to the United States, but they called all of us who was born in the United States non-aliens. And when you're a non-alien, you realize that all your civil rights are gone. And that's the point that we felt that our country didn't want us anymore.
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MURAKAMI: We got the personal notice to be taken to camp I guess in April because they took us in May. We packed up, and we walked to where they told us that the meeting place was. And that's where they gave us these official government - it looked like a luggage tag with your family number on it, and you put it around your neck if you didn't have a pin to pin it on your lapel. And that's when we officially lost our name, I guess. I was 22416E.
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MURAKAMI: We were loaded onto a school bus. And you don't know what's going to happen to you. I mean, you had rumors that you were going to get killed. So everybody was very quiet on the bus.
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MURAKAMI: By October, we were in the permanent camps. They put us on these trains and took us to Topaz, Utah. It was terrible. There was barbed wires around the whole camp, and there were tall lookout posts and armed guards guarding us. And Topaz was not ready completely. The structures weren't completely done. And the only thing in the rooms were Army cots and a pot-belly stove.
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MURAKAMI: Well, you could see why it's an upsetting time because the same thing is happening to the immigrants now. I never thought these thoughts would so vividly come back with another group of people in the United States. They're being taken without being able to communicate. And you went to these camps that were not made for humans to live in, and your education is stopped. You don't know how long you're going to be there. It's amazing that you see your life all over again.
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SUMMERS: That was Mary Murakami. She is 98 years old and was one of the tens of thousands of Japanese Americans who were forcibly incarcerated during World War 2.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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