By Theodore Shoebat
The building that the US government wants to use to house migrant children was once a Japanese internment camp, as we read in a report from the Army Times:
A U.S. Army base in Oklahoma that the federal government says will temporarily house children crossing the border without their parents was used during World War II as a Japanese internment camp.
Historical data from the National Park Service and private organizations show Fort Sill was among at least 14 Army and Department of Justice facilities nationwide where Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants were interred. The Army’s War Relocation Authority held about 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans in “relocation centers” during the war with Japan.
Tom Ikeda, executive director of Densho, an organization that documents the history of the United States’ internment of Japanese people, referred to Fort Sill as “a place layered in trauma.” He pointed to its use as a boarding school for Native American children and as a prisoner-of-war camp for Apache tribal members.
“Sites like this need to be permanently closed, not recycled to inflict more harm,” Ikeda said Wednesday in a statement. “We need to stay vigilant and we need to be showing up at these places in protest. No one showed up for Japanese Americans during WWII, but we can and we must break that pattern now.”
Ikeda’s perspective echoed calls last year from state and federal leaders and locals who objected to the Trump administration looking into housing immigrant children near the site of a former internment camp in Rohwer, Arkansas. Those plans were scrapped.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement, overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, said Tuesday it plans to house up to 1,400 migrant children at Fort Sill, near Lawton, Oklahoma , about 90 miles southwest of Oklahoma City.
An emailed request for comment Wednesday from Health and Human Services was not returned.