A U.S. flag flies at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in Inyo County on July 3, 1942. The camp was a detention facility for some of the 125,000 Japanese Americans forcibly removed from their communities on the West Coast under wartime presidential Executive Order 9066.

Armed men descend on a neighborhood, round up its non-white residents and take them to detention camps far from their homes. The scene sounds like the immigration crackdown ordered by President Donald Trump in Minneapolis and elsewhere.

But no, it happened across the West Coast in 1942 after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the U.S. military forcibly removing Japanese Americans and incarcerating them in camps during World War II.

Thursday is the annual Day of Remembrance, which marks the anniversary of Roosevelt’s signing of the order and its injustice.

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“It’s to remember and honor … the 125,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans that were incarcerated during World War II,” Karen Korematsu, president of the Fred T. Korematsu Institute, told me. “Two-thirds were American citizens, so it’s mass incarceration and without due process of law.”  

The message of Day of Remembrance and the lessons learned from the mistakes of 84 years ago seem to have been ignored by the Trump administration as it skirts or violates constitutional rights in its zeal to rid the country of undocumented immigrants.

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