Takano links – Rep. Mark Takano says his family’s experience with Japanese American incarceration during World War II mirrors today’s immigration sweeps, including detention and deportation efforts he compares to “enemy aliens” rhetoric. As Congress debates potential redress
When Rep. Mark Takano returned home for last Fourth of July, he didn’t just hear stories from neighbors in Southern California. He heard accounts of immigration patrols sweeping through communities—and one constituent told him about starting to carry a passport as “proof of the right to be in the country.”.
Takano. a Democrat from California whose American-born parents were incarcerated as young children during World War II. said the details landed with the force of personal history. His father and mother were both labeled enemy aliens in the arguments the government made at the time—arguments he says are echoed now in today’s immigration enforcement.
“I do feel like there’s a similarity of circumstance of my own 2-year-old father and my 1-year-old mother being labeled as enemy aliens and they’re considered a danger to national security,” Takano told The Associated Press in an interview.
“They’re put into these incarceration camps,” he said. “Similar arguments have been made by this administration — that immigrants pose a grave danger to our country and it’s for the security of our country that we’re doing this.”
Takano is not making the comparison lightly. He is the ranking Democrat on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, and he has spent years returning to the family facts—what happened, when it happened, and what Congress eventually did afterward.
A backdrop of escalating immigration enforcement is now pressing lawmakers and courts. President Donald Trump’s campaign promise of the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history is at an inflection point. and Americans are seeing what it looks like to round up. detain and deport thousands of people—especially in the aftermath of the deaths this year of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. U.S. citizens protesting the actions in Minneapolis.
The White House has also changed the leadership at the Department of Homeland Security as it reframes its approach. New Secretary Markwayne Mullin promised to keep the department off the front pages. Even with that shift in messaging. Takano said pressure remains from conservative groups not to let up on the goal of deporting 1 million people a year. Republican allies in Congress are fueling the immigration and deportation actions with billions of dollars in special funds.
In this climate, Takano argues the law’s moral lesson is being rewritten in real time.
His family’s story, he said, began long before Takano entered politics. A former high school history teacher before he was elected to Congress in 2012, he grew up in Southern California and absorbed the stories that shaped his worldview.
His grandfather, Isao Takano, arrived in the U.S. from Hiroshima and married Kazue Takahashi, a U.S.-born citizen. The couple settled in Bellevue, Washington, and launched a business growing tomatoes, strawberries and chrysanthemums for the marketplace in Seattle.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when the U.S. entered the war, they were swept into the forced relocation of Japanese Americans. Takano said his family was among some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry—immigrants and those born in the U.S.—who were relocated.
He said his father. William. was 2 years old when the family was sent in 1942 to the incarceration camp at Tule Lake in California. His mother. Nancy Tsugiye Sakamoto—born in California to American-born parents—was a year old when she was relocated to the detention facility in Heart Mountain. Wyoming.
Then, as now, Takano said, people are swept up in detentions carried out under anti-immigrant enforcement.
“Will Americans generations from now visit Alligator Alcatraz and think to themselves, How could our government do this?” he said during a House floor speech, referring to the Trump-era immigration detention facility in Florida.
“These future generations of Americans will look to us, the Congress, to see what we did to try to stop it.”
Between those two eras—the one that ended in redress and the one still unfolding—Takano draws a line through how the country explained itself.
He remembers his father taking him to see the land the family once owned. He learned about his great uncles who served in the Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team of Japanese American soldiers; Takano said one was killed in action in Italy. He also said his own father later collected donations for the national redress campaign.
That effort eventually turned into law. In 1988, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, which sought to apologize for the “grave injustice” done and provide $20,000 to each person detained. Takano said Republican President Ronald Reagan signed it into law.
Takano’s parents were among those who received a letter of apology from the federal government, he said, and a payment.
Now, he says some in Congress are discussing similar redress for people who have had their car windows smashed in, their homes raided and their livelihoods upended as part of Trump’s immigration enforcement operations.
“Remarkably the country did come to realize the mistake,” Takano said. “I believe we’re living through one of those eras of mistakes and I believe we can come out of this moment stronger.”
Mark Takano Japanese American incarceration WWII detention immigration raids DHS Markwayne Mullin deportation goal Civil Liberties Act of 1988 House Veterans’ Affairs Committee