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Opinion|A Racist Purge Almost Destroyed My Family. Another One Is Coming.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/opinion/immigration-trump-ww2-japanese-internment.html
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Koji Kudo, ID badge #4441-G. His head is shaved, likely by one of my aunts, with the old manual hair clippers that he used to complain cut into his scalp. He’s barely 53 inches tall — 4-foot-4 — according to the height chart behind him. The badge is sealed in orange plastic and fastened by a metal bolt attached to a safety pin for display during his incarceration. Koji, the boy who 37 years later would become my father, is 10 years old just then, an American-born citizen. He has already been imprisoned by his government for more than a year.
On Dec. 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, a “day of infamy” that brought war to America. People of Japanese ancestry soon found their loyalty questioned, despite many of them having lived in the United States for their entire lives. A few months later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 beginning the incarceration of approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast — more than two-thirds of whom were native-born citizens — as well as roughly 15,000 people of Italian and German descent. Within about four years, my father and his siblings had lost their birthright citizenship and been deported to Japan.
America is now poised to allow a new version of the same profound injustice that nearly destroyed my family to happen again. Donald Trump has vowed that upon returning to the presidency on Monday, he will move immediately to begin rounding up as many as 20 million immigrants — including U.S. citizens born here and granted birthright citizenship — and deport them. If he achieves his goal, approximately one in 16 people living in America could be imprisoned and deported during the next four years. The time between President Roosevelt’s executive order and the first arrival to the Manzanar War Relocation Center was 30 days. If Mr. Trump issues his own order on Day 1, as he’s vowed, the first people could enter detention camps by February.
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Long before becoming president, Roosevelt had promoted anti-Asian and eugenicist views. In a 1925 newspaper column, he wrote, “Anyone who has traveled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of 10, the most unfortunate results.”
The eugenicist movement achieved a major victory when President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Immigration Act of 1924, which led to the creation of the U.S. Border Patrol and established strict immigration quotas that sought to preserve the country’s existing racial composition by prioritizing immigration from Northern and Western European countries while cutting off Asian immigration almost entirely.
