Japanese-Americans Held in Internment Camps As Children to Lead Protest Against Fort Sill Child Detention: 'It's Never Too Late to Do the Right Thing'
Born in an internment camp where her family was incarcerated for years, Satsuki Ina's earliest memory from childhood is one that she will never forget.
"My earliest recollection is being on the train with my family, leaving that camp," Ina told
Newsweek. "I was two years old."
As an infant, Ina was one of more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry in the U.S. forced into detention following Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.
While Ina, now 75, was too young to remember her time at the internment camp, the weight of the "humiliation and terrific loss" her family and tens of thousands of others endured in the years before they were released from internment in 1946 is something she has had to carry her entire life.
"My parents lost the hope they had, the dreams that they had for their futures in America," Ina, a retired professor and psychotherapist, who specializes in trauma, said. "There was a lot of humiliation and such terrific loss... of their homes, of their work opportunities..."
Then, when families were eventually released after President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the closure of internment camps ahead of a Supreme Court ruling that would have seen them shuttered either way, they faced "continued racism, making finding work opportunities and housing very difficult for them."
The experience and aftermath of incarceration was so traumatic for Ina and her family that it was something her parents were rarely able to speak about.
That is why, when she learned of the Trump administration's plans to send hundreds of migrant children to Fort Sill—an Oklahoma Army base once used as an internment camp for Japanese Americans in World War II and, before that, a detention center for hundreds of Apaches, including women and children, during the late 1800s—she knew she had to take action.
On Saturday, Ina will help lead a group of Japanese-Americans who were detained in internment camps as children marching to Fort Sill to protest the Trump administration's "inhumane" plan to detain as many as 1,400 children at the base. The group will be joined by Native American groups and supporters also determined to bring child detention to an end.
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https://www.newsweek.com/japanese-american-internment-camps-u-s-fort-sill-protest-1445214