"FORT BLISS, TX – Americans of Japanese heritage say they hear echoes of their families' forced internment in the Trump administration's newest immigrant detention site. Homeland Security officials say President Donald Trump's sweeping mass deportation campaign requires a build-up of detention centers to bridge the gap between arrests and removals. They've turned to the U.S. military and private contractors to get the job done, including erecting the nation's largest immigrant detention site on Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas.
But stewards of Japanese American history, including the children and grandchildren of those who were held in detention, are criticizing the use of Fort Bliss and the plans to expand immigrant detention on American military bases.
Fort Bliss was a "cog" in the United States Japanese internment machine, said Brian Niiya, a historian and content director at Densho, a nonprofit that chronicles Japanese American internment.
Niiya's own grandfather, the managing editor of a Japanese language newspaper, was arrested the night of Japan's Pearl Harbor attack, on Dec. 7, 1941, in Honolulu and held in six different internment camps over the next two years.
"It’s important to look to this past to maybe try to understand what’s going on in the present and what the end results could be," he said.
DHS: Detaining the 'worst of the worst'
The Fort Bliss facility, known locally as Camp East Montana, rises like a white tent city on a flat desert plain. It falls within the confines of the military base but is visible from El Paso's bustling Montana Avenue and sits adjacent to an unmarked building that is the local headquarters of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
At a cost of $1.2 billion, the camp has the capacity to detain 5,000 people. Roughly 1,000 men were being held there in mid-August, according to U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, an El Paso Democrat whose district includes Fort Bliss.
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, called comparisons between detention centers for people in the country illegally and World War II internment camps “deranged and lazy.”
"The facts are ICE is targeting the worst of the worst – including murderers, MS-13 gang members, pedophiles and rapists," she said in a statement.
A Cato Institute analysis of government data in June found ICE was arresting four times more noncriminals each week on the streets than people with convictions. ICE's own data show that 45% of the roughly 59,000 people in custody in mid-August had no criminal record or charges.
Mike Ishii, executive director and co-founder of Tsuru for Solidarity, an immigrant rights advocacy group, said he sees parallels with the current administration “coming in and removing people from their homes, from their workplaces, often with no explanations.”
Ishii, whose family was held at the Minidoka concentration camp in Idaho, said, “Right now, it's very frightening for people,” he said. “In 1941, it was also frightening.”
'No accounts of wrongdoing'
Eighty years ago, Fort Bliss housed dozens of people labeled "alien enemies" by the government in a detention camp that included two compounds surrounded by double barbed wire fences, according to Densho.
Smaller numbers of immigrants from Germany and Italy were also sent there after the United States joined the European Allies and declared war against those countries.
At least 113 first-generation Japanese Americans were shipped to the base before being sent to other holding areas across the country, according to records compiled by Ireizō, a nonprofit database of Japanese Americans held in internment.
The people detained at Bliss were immigrants. They would be the first in the eventual internment of over 125,000 Japanese Americans across the country, most of them U.S. citizens.
For the vast majority, "there were no accounts of wrongdoing other than being seen as 'enemy aliens,'" said Karen Umemoto, director of the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The 1798 Alien Enemies Act
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the American government viewed Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans as potential traitors, Umemoto said. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt immediately invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to detain people and confiscate their property.
Trump invoked the same law this year to designate some immigrants as "alien enemies" and target them for rapid deportation. The Supreme Court has blocked him on certain removals.
The Biden administration also used Fort Bliss to house migrants who crossed the border as unaccompanied children.
Under Biden, the Fort Bliss "emergency intake site" run by a private contractor was used to process the children for admission into the United States – not for deportation. Still, survivors and descendants of Japanese internment staged a protest at the facility in 2021 to call attention to the poor conditions there, including problems related to child safety and case management that were later documented in a 2022 federal report.
Asked about the base's history of internment, the Pentagon referred USA TODAY to an Aug. 7 news briefing in which spokeswoman Kingsley Wilson said Fort Bliss would "be the largest federal detention center in history for this critical mission, the deportation of illegal aliens."
Learning lessons from history
At midday on Aug. 21, construction and passenger vehicles came and went from the Fort Bliss camp. Puffy, storybook clouds hung in a pale blue sky.
There was no signage on the road to announce the facility, other than warnings affixed to plywood: "All vehicles subject to search. No cameras, cellphones or video recorders allowed."
As historians, Niiya said, "We always used to say that it's important to know this (history) so that we can prevent things from ever happening again… But perhaps we can't say that anymore."
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