January 30th is Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties in Virginia. First recognized in 2016, the day serves as a reminder when the United States incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War Two.
Now, Hanover County is considering the sale of a privately-owned, 550,000 square foot warehouse to Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the federal government uses a similar legal theory to detain immigrants. And those who first honored Korematsu are seeing comparisons.
“This executive order was called ‘military necessity’ back in 1942, today we call it national security,” Karen Korematsu with the Fred T. Korematsu Institute told Radio IQ in a phone interview. Her father Fred, a U.S. citizen, famously went to the U.S. Supreme Court after refusing to enter an internment camp created for those with Japanese heritage living in the U.S. after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
“Even babies and the infirmed were forcibly removed from hospitals or their homes and sent to desolate areas of this country," she said of the treatment Japanese Americans faced. "You lost your property, your homes, your dignity. The Japanese American incarceration was a human rights violation.”
The authority used by then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt to mass incarcerate 120,000 Japanese Americans, 2/3rds of which were US citizens, was under the Alien Enemy Act. Fred sued and lost, and while the federal government later paid reparations to those impacted by the incarceration, the legal precedent behind Korematsu v. US, siding with the government still stands today.
Now, 80 years later, President Donald Trump is using the same authority to round up people with alleged connections to Central American gangs and cartels and deport them, along with others facing immigration infractions. The Hanover County facility would hold 5,000 to 10,000 people at a time, according to reporting by the Washington Post.
It’s something former Delegate Mark Keam, a Korean American who authored the bill creating Korematsu Day in 2015, hopes the locality thinks about.
“We do not want to see anything like this happening. The timing of both, what’s going on in Minnesota and around the corner of the annual Fred Korematsu Civil Liberties Day in Virginia makes it really uncomfortable to say the least,” Keam told Radio IQ.
"The only way we can make sure bad things from the past don't happen again is to recognize problems when they're happening," he added. "Korematsu was wartime, they were mostly US citizens, but the idea that the American government would massively round up people, deny them due process, we need to live up to a higher standard."
Hanover County’s Board of Supervisors is holding a closed meeting Wednesday to consider the ICE proposal.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
