\n<\/p>\n
WASHINGTON — <\/span>The congressman returned home last Fourth of July to startling stories in Southern California as immigration patrols<\/a> swept through communities and one constituent told him about starting to carry a passport as proof of the right to be in the country.<\/p>\n Rep. Mark Takano<\/a>, whose American-born parents were both incarcerated as young children with their families during the forced relocation<\/a> of Japanese Americans during World War II<\/a>, could not help but see the parallels between that chapter of American history and this one.<\/p>\n \u201cI 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\u2019re considered a danger to national security,” he told The Associated Press in an interview.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re put into these incarceration camps,\u201d he said. \u201cSimilar arguments have been made by this administration \u2014 that immigrants pose a grave danger to our country and it\u2019s for the security of our country that we\u2019re doing this.\u201d <\/p>\n President Donald Trump\u2019s<\/a> campaign promise of the largest mass deportation operation<\/a> in U.S. history is at an inflection point. Americans are seeing what it looks like to round up<\/a>, detain and deport<\/a> thousands of people, particularly in the aftermath of the deaths this year of Renee Good<\/a> and Alex Pretti<\/a>, U.S. citizens protesting the actions in Minneapolis<\/a>.<\/p>\n The White House changed the leadership<\/a> at the Department of Homeland Security<\/a> as it reframes its approach. New Secretary Markwayne Mullin<\/a> promised to keep the department off the front pages. <\/p>\n But Trump is also under mounting pressure<\/a> from conservative groups not to let up on the goal of deporting 1 million people a year. The president’s Republican allies in Congress are fueling the immigration and deportation actions with billions of dollars<\/a> in special funds.<\/p>\n Takano, the ranking Democrat on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, has drawn from his own family history \u2014 and the country’s eventual redress to Japanese Americans who were detained \u2014 to challenge Trump’s approach.<\/p>\n \u201cWe look back on that era of history as a shameful one, as a time when our political leaders failed the Constitution, failed the American people,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n A former high school history teacher before being elected to Congress in 2012, Takano grew up in Southern California and came to understand the family stories.<\/p>\n His grandfather Isao Takano arrived in the U.S. from Hiroshima and married Kazue Takahashi, a U.S.-born citizen. Together they settled in Bellevue, Washington, and launched a business growing tomatoes, strawberries and chrysanthemums for the marketplace in Seattle.<\/p>\n When the U.S. entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they were among some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, immigrants and those born in the U.S., forcibly relocated<\/a>.<\/p>\n His father, William, was 2 years old when his family was sent in 1942 to the incarceration camp at Tule Lake<\/a> 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n Then, as now, he said, people are being swept up in the anti-immigrant detentions. <\/p>\n \u201cWill Americans generations from now visit Alligator Alcatraz and think to themselves, How could our government do this?\u201d Takano said during a House floor speech, referring to the Trump-era immigration detention facility<\/a> in Florida. <\/p>\n \u201cThese future generations of Americans will look to us, the Congress, to see what we did to try to stop it.\u201d<\/p>\n Takano 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<\/a> of Japanese American soldiers; one was killed in action in Italy. He recalls his own father later collected donations for the national redress campaign.<\/p>\n In 1988 Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, which sought to apologize for the \u201cgrave injustice\u201d that had been done and provide $20,000 to each person detained. Republican President Ronald Reagan signed it into law.<\/p>\n Takano’s parents were among those who received a letter of apology from the federal government, he said, and a payment. <\/p>\n Talks are underway among some in Congress, he said, for a similar redress to the people who have had their car windows smashed in, their homes raided and livelihoods upended as part of Trump’s immigration enforcement operations.<\/p>\n \u201cRemarkably the country did come to realize the mistake,\u201d he said. \u201cI believe we\u2019re living through one of those eras of mistakes and I believe we can come out of this moment stronger.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n