A row of city officials, including staffers from the offices of Governor Bob Ferguson, Mayor Bruce Harrell and Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, sat on the stage of Seattle’s MLK Fame Community Center. Below, a diverse row of individuals faced them, each with an experience to share. Attendees filled the rest of the room, with some groups separating to fill any gaps in the seating and others retiring to the outer aisles. When the testimonies began, all chatter subsided and, one by one, each speaker became the sole voice in the room.
On August 19, 2025, Tsuru for Solidarity hosted local city officials and community members to listen to Japanese American survivors share their experiences with incarceration during WWII, as well as to hear about current experiences and conditions within the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. This was not the organization’s first time discussing the topic, as their website includes in their mission to, “Educate, advocate, and protest to close all U.S. concentration camps”.
Tsuru for Solidarity’s Director of Organizing, Becca Asaki, explained, “We organized this today because the Japanese American community, in May, asked for an opportunity to share our experience, to share our history of incarceration with elected leaders and the connections that we very clearly see between what we experienced during WWII and what is happening today”.
In December, 1941, immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, ex-President Franklin D. Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, leading to the arrest of over one thousand Japanese Americans, including citizens born and raised in the United States.
In February, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the forced removal of 122,000 Japanese Americans, initially to “assembly centers,” and then long-term concentration camps as they were being built. In Washington, the Puyallup fairgrounds served as an assembly center known as “Camp Harmony,” until The Minidoka Center was completed in Idaho.
During the event, many speakers expressed the poor conditions within these internment camps. Stanley Shikuma spoke about the bad food, poor sanitation and lack of health care, along with his mother’s worry that his brother would die when he contracted dysentery. Another speaker explained how her family became so ill from the food, they became worried they were being poisoned.
The last camp was closed in 1946 and in 1988, ex-President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which included an apology and a $20,000 payment to every person who was incarcerated as reparations.
One speaker quoted her father’s sentiments, “I will never accept money. Nothing will ever replace what I lost,” though he was not alive at the time the Civil Liberties Act passed. She then told the story of her friend’s father, who ripped his $20,000 check to pieces.
Dr. Joseph Okimoto, survivor and retired psychiatrist, stressed the trauma and PTSD that many Japanese American survivors faced, and the relevance of these consequences to current events. Okimoto states, “I feel a great sense of urgency as I see history repeating itself in the cruel arrest of immigrant families by masked federal agents who refuse to identify themselves.This kind of trauma is a consequence of political decisions and therefore clearly avoidable”.
Shikuma also emphasized trauma resulting from incarceration. He explained that forty years after his mother’s departure from imprisonment in California, she could still remember her exact time of one year, one month and one day. “That’s trauma that lasts a lifetime,” Shikuma said. He then highlighted parallels between Japanese American imprisonment and the conditions within ICE’s detention centers. Shikuma expressed that it is, “the same inhumane treatment as in 1942”.
About twenty-five miles away from the MLK Fame Community Center, the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma (NWIPC) has been owned and operated by the private company GEO Group since 2005, a year after the facility’s opening in 2004. The NWIPC has the capacity to hold 1,575 detainees, according to laresistencianw.org.
Rufina Reyes affirmed the claims of poor treatment within detention centers, especially within the NWIPC. She shared her work as the director of La Resitencia, an organization whose goal is to shut down the Northwest Ice Processing Center and hears the first-hand experiences of detainees through the organization’s direct phone lines into the facility. Reyes listed issues such as a lack of nutrition, lack of medicine and high risks of death.
“So many people are suffering,” Reyes said while explaining the suicides that occur within the NWIPC. “They are very bad, mentally, because they don’t know what is happening with their cases.”
Picketers protest in front of the MLK Fame Community Center before the start of Tsuru for Solidarity’s press conference on August 19, 2025. Photo by Kaitlyn Montez.
Yadit Daza, a direct line coordinator for La Resistencia, also provided insight into the conditions of the NWIPC.
“The medical care that they are given takes weeks, months, very long periods of time before they are treated and they can only be seen for one thing at a time,” Daza explained. “Even essential hygiene products are not given to them, like toothbrushes, just essential things—they have to purchase. [..] And they’ll just shower with water. Sometimes there’s no running water.”
Speakers at the event repeatedly made connections between patterns associated with Japanese-American incarceration beginning in 1942, and the current circumstances and strategies related to immigration, deportation and detention centers.
“It’s eighty years later and we see the same callous, inhumane, unjustified treatment of people, just because of who they are, not because of anything they really did,” Shikuma expressed. “We can’t just sit by and say ‘oh, well’. I know a lot of people feel like it’s the federal government—there’s nothing we can do. We’re just one small community or we’re just one small person. And I tell them, somebody’s gotta take the first step. Somebody’s gotta raise their hand to stand up to say no. And, if one person does it, maybe another will do it. If two people do it, maybe ten people will do it. If ten people, maybe a thousand. And maybe we’ll have a million.”
For most speakers, Tsuru for Solidarity’s event was not their first time telling their story as a call to action, and they did not seem to have intentions of it being their last.
