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THREAD: It’s both profoundly offensive and oddly appropriate that the Center for Immigration Studies (widely known as a racist, anti-immigrant org) picked this week to launch a PR effort claiming that family detention doesn’t cause suffering or deprive anyone of civil rights. /1
The timing of CIS’s effort to whitewash family detention is especially offensive because today, Feb. 19, is the #DayOfRemembrance, when Japanese Americans mark the anniversary of #EO9066, the executive order authorizing the mass roundup and detention of Japanese Americans. /2
Yet this timing is also oddly appropriate, because CIS’s pro-family-detention rhetoric so closely echoes WWII propaganda justifying the roundup and incarceration of my community. /3
The 1944 propaganda film, “A Challenge to Democracy,” opened by emphasizing that the Japanese Americans in these prison camps were not “prisoners” but “merely dislocated people.” archive.org/details/Challe… /4
Similarly, CIS characterizes the detained families as “residents” who are not imprisoned, but merely receiving “a free place to stay.” (CIS does not mention what would happen to anyone who tried to escape.) /5
The WWII propaganda film emphasized that the incarcerees were allowed to work at low-wage jobs inside the camps, received medical care, went to school, and played baseball inside the camp—as if these things could normalize growing up in a prison. archive.org/details/Challe… /6
CIS echoes that WWII propaganda when it claims that it’s okay for children to grow up in ICE detention because they get “unlimited food” along with medical services, education, clothing, and access to athletic activities. /7
But the reality of family detention is that, regardless of how much the government tries to make them look like summer camps, these are prisons. /8
This is something I saw when I participated in an NGO visit to the Dilley “family residential center” in 2015. (Yes, that was during the Obama administration; that admin created this ICE infrastructure and handed it over to Trump.) aclu.org/blog/smart-jus… /9
It’s what Satsuki Ina, who was born in one of the WWII prison camps and later became a psychotherapist, saw when she visited children in family detention. splinternews.com/a-former-japan… /10
And it’s something that *every* advocate who has visited these family prisons has seen, every year that these abominations have continued to operate. Just read the stories from @abogadatejana @BridgetCambria8 @karhoff and others. /11
So, this week, please commemorate #DayOfRemembrance not just by remembering the injustice of the WWII incarceration, but by remembering the lies that were used to sanitize and justify it—and recognizing when those same lies are being peddled to justify present injustices. /12
Also, please recognize how all of this fits into the larger story of white supremacy in the United States. I'm making a specific analogy here, but that analogy shouldn't be used to claim that either Japanese American incarceration or family detention are completely unique. /13
These lies—particularly the notion that people should be grateful to get "free" meals and beds when they're held against their will—appear so often in our history. /14
You can see the same types of lies in justifications for the enslavement of Black people, the subjugation of Native Americans, and continuing through to mass incarceration in the criminal legal system. /15
