Over four days and more than 45 miles walked, a group of protesters making a pilgrimage between immigration enforcement sites in King County is drawing a line between mounting immigrant detentions across the nation and the incarceration of Japanese Americans decades ago.
Cars and trucks whizzed by as the group of about a dozen demonstrators hoisted signs into the misty morning sky outside of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Tukwila on Thursday reading, “Not OK in 42! Not OK Now” and “End family detention,” singing on call-and-response, “We remember our dignity. Kodomo no tame ni.”
Or in English, “For the sake of the children” — a Japanese phrase of resistance used after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in 1942, authorizing the forced removal and incarceration of more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent from the West Coast, about 70% of whom were U.S. citizens.
The pilgrimage, organized by Japanese American and immigrant advocate network Tsuru for Solidarity, began in Seattle’s Hing Hay Park on Wednesday and will end at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Tacoma on Saturday, where the group will host a rally at 1 p.m.
The group is demanding the abolition of ICE, the shuttering of its detention centers and the end of family separations.
One of the first stops was King County International Airport, where detained immigrants bound for the Tacoma detention center are flown in and others are flown out to staging areas and other detention facilities across the country.
The group also visited the Tukwila field office, where immigrants are required to check in while their cases are pending, and the Puyallup Fairgrounds, where a temporary incarceration camp was set up for Japanese Americans during World War II, as a permanent one was built in Idaho.
Tsuru for Solidarity is leading a tour of such places, which began with a march to the Dilley detention center in Texas, where the group braved 105-degree heat, rattlesnakes and the surveillance of Border Patrol, said co-founder Mike Ishii. Next up, the group will make pilgrimages in San Francisco and Honolulu, among the six planned locations.
The pilgrimages are inspired by the nonviolent actions of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s and, in particular, the march on Selma led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ishii said. He hopes the demonstration tactic will catch on.
Satsuki Ina, 82, a Japanese American incarceration camp survivor and co-founder of Tsuru for Solidarity, sat in a lawn chair Thursday morning as the demonstrators gathered outside the Tukwila field office before their pilgrimage. Though she was now too old to walk the many miles, she spoke of horrors repeating themselves in America.
Ina was born in the Tule Lake incarceration camp in Northern California. Her birth was long and painful, as her mother didn’t have medication to manage the pain. She worried she wouldn’t be able to produce enough milk under so much stress. Ina’s father was separated from them, and after her parents renounced their American citizenship out of despair and anger, the U.S. government tried to deport the family to Japan.
Though she was too young to remember the camp, Ina said she carries the trauma with her.
As she learned in her career as a child psychologist, child incarceration creates anxiety that can manifest as depression. For Japanese Americans like her family, there was immense pressure not to step out of line and to achieve highly. But her parents never regained trust in their government, even after their renunciation was determined null and void, made under duress.
Ina’s life changed and she was reborn as an immigrant rights activist when an American Civil Liberties Union attorney invited her to accompany him on a tour undercover to a new detention center in Karnes, Texas, in 2017.
She was struck when she saw rows of little shoes in a supply cabinet prepared for children. Inside a waiting room, a corner with bright carpet and full of toys was empty while children clung instead to their mothers, afraid. Speaking to mothers and children inside, she learned the guards were pouring black pepper on their food as a message of deterrence.
Ina recognized these scenes. It was happening again and “many of us who have survived incarceration as a child know the lasting impacts,” she told the group in Tukwila on Thursday morning.
Sitting in a lawn chair next to her, the Rev. Kenji Akahoshi felt much the same. The 84-year-old from Central California was 2 weeks old when he and his family were held in the Amache, Colo., incarceration camp. For decades, he could not confront memories of the camp and avoided experiences for the Day of Remembrance every February.
One of Akahoshi’s first memories is his family stuffing newspapers under the door of their room to keep out sand from dust storms at the camp. His father lost the grocery store he owned after they were incarcerated. Lacking money, it took them years to make it back to California.
The trauma would bring Akahoshi to tears when reminded, but when he learned that President Donald Trump’s administration was separating immigrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border during his first term — an enforcement tactic that Trump’s second administration has repeated — he decided to get involved.
“I felt I had a responsibility to respond as someone who has gone through this experience,” he said.
As she set off Thursday morning, South Seattle resident Erin Shigaki was outfitted in Saucony athletic shoes, a backpack full of layers and a yellow traffic vest to escort the demonstrators safely alongside the busy road as cars zooming by honked.
Both of the 56-year-old’s parents, who saw her off the previous morning, were held at the Minidoka incarceration camp in Idaho and, like many survivors, never spoke about their trauma. Now, Shigaki says it’s her duty to “stand up for immigrants.”
As she walked, staring down a nearly six-hour trek to her next destination at the White River Buddhist Temple, Shigaki said she felt “really empowered by my ancestors.”
She beamed at “how small and mighty this group is.”
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