Survivors of Japanese internment camps organize No Kings protest at Tanforan Memorial in California

By CBS Bay Area

Satsuki Ina’s earliest memories are of barbed wire and internment camps.

“We went from Tule Lake, my father went to Bismarck, North Dakota,” Ina said, thumbing through a photo album. 

Her family, like 125,000 other Japanese Americans, was hauled off to camps across the United States during World War II. Ina was born while her parents were already incarcerated, but the family wouldn’t stay together for long.

After denouncing U.S. citizenship out of fear, her father was sent to several other camps around the country. The Inas would remain separated for more than four years.

“We were reunited in 1946. This is after the war. We’re still in prison and reunited in Crystal City, Texas,” Ina said.

Her family endured violence, isolation and hopelessness during internment, which she said she doesn’t believe they’ve ever recovered from. Now, nearly 80 years later, she said the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids are forcing her to relive that history.

“It took a lifetime for me to figure out, put all these pieces together and look at what happened to my family and my community, to see that the trauma effect continues today,” Ina said.

In January, the Trump administration removed the sensitive locations policy that kept ICE agents from entering churches, schools and hospitals.

Ina said there’s a connection between WWII internments and ICE raids. That’s why she’s helped gather a community of Japanese Americans to demonstrate for No Kings Day, a nationwide protest, at the Tanforan Assembly Memorial in San Bruno, California.

“When we were being removed, we essentially disappeared, and there were no marches or petitions or advocates on our behalf. So it feels like we’re being called to respond,” Ina said.

To her, it’s an act of solidarity and defiance, but Nick Berg, the vice chair of communications for the San Francisco GOP, doesn’t see the protest this way.

“Nobody is advocating for a return to monarchy in this country, not even Trump. So I think that it’s really a false narrative,” Berg said. “We have Democratic mechanisms in this country. They are still intact.”

Berg said the No Kings protests misrepresent the Trump administration and that internment camps are an unfair comparison. He condemned the actions taken against Japanese Americans during the war but still said the ICE raids are different.

“I mean, California is still part of the United States. It’s subject to federal law,” Berg said. “And so, federal immigration activity needs to happen, and I don’t know why states, including California, think that they can pass special laws to exempt themselves from enforcement of federal law.”

But Ina is worried that what happened to her family may happen again if the connection between the two events is not made.

“Want to educate people, and this is not an exception in our American history,” she said.