Quick Take
UC Santa Cruz student Skyla Tomine is terrified by the language she hears in the news, including the term “enemy alien.” It sounds chillingly familiar to Executive Order 9066, which forced her great-grandparents and other Japanese Americans into internment camps. The harm, she writes, is lasting. Many people she knows insist they would have stepped in to help her grandparents and others. It’s time, she writes, to prove it.
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In October 2024, I sat in UC Santa Cruz’s McHenry Library, procrastinating studying for an impending midterm. As always, my news feed was a dark place, but my thumb froze when it got to a headline from NPR: “Trump is promising deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.”
In my mind, I could see my great-grandfather’s denim jacket, an ominous, target-shaped symbol on the back, the letters “EA” for “enemy alien” stenciled in white paint, marking prisoners at Fort Lincoln in North Dakota, the largest internment camp for men during World War II.
I thought, it’s happening again.
Just three months into his presidency, Donald Trump delivered on his promise from the headline, invoking the Alien Enemy Act for the first time since it was used against people of Japanese ancestry during World War II.
I am gosei, a fifth-generation Japanese American, a proud granddaughter of Satsuki Ina and Chris Tomine, both born “doing time” in Tule Lake Segregation Center. My grandmother is my greatest inspiration; she is a community leader, healer and an expert on the trauma that our community has suffered.
Now, just after the 84th anniversary of Executive Order 9066 – signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Feb. 19, 1942, authorizing the military to remove and incarcerate over 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens, into inland detention camps – I am reeling from the repetition of history.
Like my family was, many immigrants today are being imprisoned indefinitely, without due process, on the basis of their ancestry. The Supreme Court has thankfully blocked the Trump administration from invoking the Alien Enemies Act, but I still see my family’s history reflected in the headlines every day.
In San Francisco, on Sansome Street, the facial expressions of those in line for immigration check-ins closely resemble a Dorothea Lange photograph of my great-grandmother waiting in line to register for evacuation, 84 years earlier in the same city.
The president’s claims that immigrants are criminals contain echoes of the spy allegations made against Japanese Americans, both false justifications for egregious civil and human rights abuses. Photos from CECOT, the El Salvadoran prison where many men detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been sent, remind me of the photographs of brutality at the Tule Lake jail.
And of course, the dehumanizing words: “enemy alien,” used in 1942 and again now.
I could draw a hundred comparisons like these, and every day I wonder, have we not learned from the past?
While my community continues to suffer from generational trauma and loss of culture, the government enacts similar, racially motivated and traumatizing policies on other communities of color, tearing apart their families and creating harm that will last for generations.
When my middle school teachers taught us about the Japanese American incarceration, my classmates asked, “Why didn’t anyone speak up?”
Many remarked, “If I were alive then, I would have done something.” And maybe they would have. Perhaps they would have called their senators, protested or volunteered.
Mistreatment of immigrants is nothing new in this country; it has persisted every day of my life and even before I was born. But under Trump’s second term, escalated state violence against immigrant communities has become especially pronounced and even cruelly celebrated.
If you ever believed you would have done something, then the truth is simple: You are being asked to do something now.
Skyla Tomine is a proud descendant of Japanese Americans incarcerated at Tule Lake, Crystal City and Fort Lincoln. She is a UC Santa Cruz student, research fellow and member of the Tsuru for Solidarity Leadership Council.