Trump’s war on immigrants repeats shameful chapter in America’s past

The Trump administration boasts that its war on immigrants, which has included threats of imprisonment and incentives to “self-deport,” has led 1.9 million people to “voluntarily” leave the country or “remigrate” in the past year. But these decisions are no more voluntary than the ones made by thousands of Japanese immigrants and their families eight decades ago, which still reverberate across generations. 

In the 1940s, opportunistic U.S. politicians and military leaders relied on racial prejudice and wartime fears to justify the inhumane and illegal treatment of the Japanese community, including U.S. citizens. Today, the Trump administration is using the same racist playbook—including the resurrection of the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act—to cleanse America of people it claims pose a danger to public safety, to job security, to a white Christian civilization threatened by immigrants from non-white nations. Now, as then, America’s values and its commitment to rule of law are under threat, along with the lives and futures of people who made this country their adopted home. 

On the night of December 7, 1941, George Hasuike returned home to Burbank after a family fishing trip to find two men waiting to arrest him. The 41-year-old Japanese immigrant and father of three American-born children became one of more than 2,000 Japanese people, mostly first-generation Issei, detained as disloyal “enemy aliens” in the early days of the Pacific War. 

Hasuike, the owner of one of L.A.’s largest produce operations, had finally encountered an obstacle he could not overcome. 

Long before Sam Walton revolutionized retail, Hasuike, who arrived in America in 1918 with big dreams and little else, found ways to squeeze costs from the supply chain connecting California’s Japanese farmers to Los Angeles’ huge consumer market. To extend the life of his perishable stock, the savvy businessman pioneered the packaging and sale of frozen vegetables. 

In just two decades, Hasuike, a leader in L.A.’s Little Tokyo neighborhood, built Three Star Produce Company into a regional powerhouse, employing 350 people at a string of small markets, a service station, a box company, and Lucky Star Market, one of Southern California’s first full-service grocery stores. 

To build a life of comfort for his family and safeguard its future, he followed the laws that governed his adopted homeland—and barred him from becoming a U.S. citizen, owning property, or even living in many parts of California. He put the family’s assets in his American-born wife’s name, a common practice among Japanese immigrants. He paid his bills and taxes and bought life insurance. He reached across racial lines, raising his family in a predominantly white suburb and forging partnerships with people like Frank Van de Kamp, the owner of the popular Van de Kamp bakery. 

Had this trajectory of business success continued, the Hasuike name might grace symphony halls or university buildings in Los Angeles today. Instead, just hours after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, law enforcement agents escorted George Hasuike to a waiting car and drove him away. It happened so fast his children didn’t even get to say goodbye. He disappeared into the federal prison system, where he joined other Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants labeled “enemy aliens” and potential saboteurs.

Two months later, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the order that led to the imprisonment of the rest of the Hasuike family as well as more than 120,000 other people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. George’s wife, May, and their son and daughters, all U.S. citizens, were sent to Camp Amache, a hastily erected detention facility in the southeastern Colorado desert. 

Meanwhile, as the Japanese Imperial Army advanced across Asia, its troops captured more than 10,000 American men, women, and children. Their rescue became a high priority for State Department officials. 

The Hasuikes never expected to be forced from their home, much less America. But the U.S. needed to find Japanese people to “repatriate” to Japan in a one-to-one exchange for captured Americans. The definition of repatriation is to return to the country of your birth or citizenship. The vast majority of the people of Japanese descent in America were U.S. citizens. If the government sent them to Japan, they would be trading Americans for Americans. But in the chaos of war, when rule of law gave way to rule by prejudice and fear, that didn’t matter. 

U.S. officials were divided over the ethics and legality of shipping the Japanese, particularly American citizens, to a war zone. So, in the spring of 1942, they asked incarcerated Japanese and Japanese Americans to state in writing whether they wanted to be sent to Japan. Much to the officials’ surprise, the vast majority, including May and her children, said no. 

But for George Hasuike, who remained in a separate prison, options were quickly narrowing. His request for an appeal of the government’s finding of disloyalty was rejected. The feds had impounded his home, his cars, his company, his life insurance policies, even his children’s savings accounts. The Internal Revenue Service began investigating George and his wife on dubious charges of tax evasion. 

Hasuike eventually decided the only way he and his family could be together was on a ship to Japan. When his name appeared on the passenger manifest for the second civilian exchange, in 1943, he asked his wife to return with him to his family’s village near Hiroshima.“Shigata ga nai,” May, whose repeated requests to be reunited with her husband had gone unheard, told their children. It can’t be helped.  

In September 1943, the M.S. Gripsholm set sail for Mormugao, India, carrying nearly 1,500 passengers of Japanese descent, including the Hasuikes and other Japanese Americans. More than half of those on board were Japanese Latin Americans—mostly from Peru—who were seized at the Roosevelt administration’s request, shipped to the U.S., and eventually used as barter for the trade.  

In the midst of a bitter war, U.S. officials had pulled off a diplomatic coup—the rescue of nearly 3,000 Allied civilians in two exchanges. But for many innocent civilians like the Hasuikes, it meant being traded to a country that was no longer, or never had been, their home. 

Scenes from this dark chapter in U.S. history are back today, as immigrants who have sunk deep roots in this country, including U.S. citizens and others here legally, are hunted down, imprisoned, and deported without due process. 

Now, as then, immigrants are quietly debating whether to leave America to protect themselves and their families. They are selling furniture and cars, finding refuge for pets, and saying goodbye to friends and in some cases, their American-born children. 

The Trump administration’s ongoing demonization of the other, the insinuation that people with a certain skin color or birthplace do not belong in America, is an affront to the promise of freedom, democracy, and liberty for all that brought George Hasuike to California to chase his entrepreneurial dream. It makes a mockery of the democratic values that our soldiers and sailors—including 33,000 Japanese Americans—fought for in World War II. It is the very definition of anti-American.  

This commentary was adapted from an essay produced for Zócalo Public Square.