Kyoko Oda, 80, was born in 1945 into incarceration at Tule Lake Segregation Center, where 30,000 Japanese Americans lived when forced from their homes during World War II.
Her father, Tatsuo Inouye, was isolated from his family and confined at the Tule Lake Stockade — a “prison within a prison,” as Oda called it, used to punish those labelled “disloyal” for resisting incarceration.
Eight decades later, Oda shared her story at “Never Again,” an event on Aug. 23 where she and other camp survivors, activists and community members spoke against President Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order.
“Today, our history is in danger of being erased in places like the National Monument at Tule Lake and Manzanar. Our government describes it as content sanitization,” Oda said to hundreds of supporters gathered at Democracy Plaza in Little Tokyo.
Signed in March by President Trump, Executive Order 14253 aims to counter what it calls a “distorted narrative” within federal institutions, including museums and parks — anything that reconstructs American history as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
A recent letter from the White House on Aug. 12 called for a review of all current and future exhibitions at eight of the Smithsonian’s 21 museums to “assess tone, historical framing, and alignment with American ideals.”
But the directive does not only touch Smithsonian museums, which have long been operated independently but are heavily reliant on federal funding. The ripples of this order have been felt nationwide as some museums have changed their programming as they try to stay clear of topics including gender, sexuality and race, The New York Times reported.
The White House was contacted for comment for this report but did not immediately respond.
Oda and the more than 30 organizations at “Never Again,” including the National Parks Conservation Association and Los Angeles Conservancy, fear Trump’s directive is an attempt to censor Japanese American history and other Civil Rights sites.
They say the effects of Executive Order 14253 are beyond the erasure of the injustices faced by the hundreds of thousands Japanese, German and Italian Americans who were interned during World War II.
The effects span across both past and present, they say, as Immigration and Customs Enforcements detains and deports immigrants nationwide.
“Now, it’s more important than ever that these stories are ever forgotten,” Japanese American National Museum (JANM) President and CEO Ann Burroughs said during the event. “The same laws are being used now, that were used in 1942.”
History is ‘reverberating’
During World War II, more than 135,000 people of Japanese, German and Italian descent — the majority were American citizens — were deemed “enemy aliens,” taken from their homes and sent to internment camps without due process.
Their detainment and deportation were empowered by Executive Order 9066 of 1942 and the Alien Enemies Ac of 1798, a federal law that gives the president wartime authority to deport non-U.S. citizens of enemy countries.
In 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed an official letter of apology, acknowledging the injustice of the internment of Japanese Americans and left each living survivor with a $20,000 reparations check.
At his inaugural address in January, President Trump set up his intention to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to “eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks bringing devastating crime to U.S. soil.”
Shortly after his address, the JANM issued a statement in February pushing back against the president’s promise to invoke the act, one it said has been “historically used to target marginalized communities.”
But Trump later invoked the act on Mar. 14 to deport alleged criminal Venezuelans, marking the first time the act was used since 1942 and outside of congressionally declared wartime.
Leaders at “Never Again,” say the act’s invocation renews a historical anti-immigrant climate.
“The terror of ICE raids across the country and the terror of 1942 when families were rounded up. Those terrors are no different,” Burroughs said.
The stepped-up immigration enforcement, promised by Trump in his campaign to return to the Oval Office, saw at least 180,000 people deported by ICE, with 60,000 now in custody according to recent ICE data. The deportation efforts are targeting dangerous felons, according to ICE officials, who say they are achieving that goal.
But critics of the deportation program and supporters of “Never Again” say the raids are targeting people without criminal records and instead, are based on apparent race or ethnicity.
Just a week earlier, dozens of border patrol agents conducted an immigration operation on Aug. 14 outside of the JANM as Gov. Gavin Newsom and other political leaders were speaking at an event.
Dennis Arguelles, Southern California Director of the National Parks Conservation Association, describes national parks as being in “existential crisis.” Since the Trump administration returned to office, the National Parks Service has lost nearly a quarter of its permanent staff.
Arguelles said he fears Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order will further impede the National Park System’s mission to preserve the natural and cultural resources of its parks.
“Incarceration during World War II is just one of the many stories told by our national parks. But it reverberates because of what we are witnessing today,” Arguelles said.
Oda’s speech at Democracy Plaza concluded with a chant, shouted in unison by speakers and supporters: “No raids! No erasure!”