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Fort Sill is a place layered in trauma. Japanese Americans were incarcerated there during WWII, and one inmate was shot & killed trying to escape. It also housed a Native American boarding school where children were separated from their families. time.com/5605120/trump-…
It also served as a Prisoner of War camp for members of the Chiricahua Apache tribe who were forcibly relocated from the Southwest to Fort Sill in 1894. okhistory.org/publications/e…
Sites like Fort Sill need to be permanently closed, not recycled to inflict more harm.
Fort Sill was one of more than 70 sites where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during WWII. Jakelin Caal, 1 of 6 children who have died in Border Patrol custody in less than a year, was at Lordsburg, NM, another former JA incarceration site. densho.org/sitesofshame/m…
Meanwhile, the Dilley, TX “family residential center,” the largest family detention site in the country, is only 40 miles away from the former Crystal City concentration camp. encyclopedia.densho.org/Crystal%20City…
Every single one of these sites exist on stolen land, and the majority of Central American migrants currently detained are Indigenous people.
Systems of incarceration—past and present—are often more vast and hidden than we realize. This is a deliberate tactic to keep us from recognizing these systems as part of a larger historical pattern.
What we're calling a border crisis today is not just happening at the border. Family detention centers are in our own backyards, mass deportation flights are taking off from our local airports, and immigrants are disappearing inside the for-profit prison industry.
We need to stay vigilant and we need to be showing up at these places in protest. No one showed up for Japanese Americans during WWII, but we can and we must break that pattern now. #NeverAgainIsNOW
An expanded/shareable version of this thread can be found here: densho.org/fort-sill-is-a…
