Opinion | I Know What Incarceration Does to Families. It Happened to Mine.

 

When the family first heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 on the radio, they dismissed it as the work of a few fanatics. But that evening, several F.B.I. men came to their house and took my grandfather away. He and dozens of other Japanese-American businessmen and community leaders in the Bay Area had been deemed “enemy aliens,” and he was sent to an army internment camp in Montana.

In the following weeks and months, the fear-mongering grew, and officials increasingly took to using racist epithets. “A Jap is a Jap,” said Lt. Gen. John DeWitt, the commander of the Western Command and the Fourth Army, in February of 1942. “The Japanese race is an enemy race,” he wrote, “and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of American citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.” Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy shrugged off questions about the legality of the situation, writing “the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”

After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, which authorized the forced removal of residents of Japanese descent from the Pacific Coast, an 8 p.m. curfew was imposed on Japanese residents there and they were ordered to turn over all “contraband,” including firearms, cameras, radios and binoculars. My mother handed over her Brownie camera to the local police. In April, they were designated Family Number 13453, and given 10 days to pack up and vacate the house where they had lived for a decade and a half.

They were allowed to take only what they could carry. Everything else had to be sold, thrown out, given to friends, or put in storage — including the piano and the rest of the furniture, books, records, paintings, rugs, linens, plates and glasses, silverware, boxes of family letters, photographs and old Valentine and Christmas cards, and all the knickknacks and bits of yarn and fabric that my grandmother, a devout hoarder, had saved during her more than 25 years in America. The three of them (my grandfather was still in the internment camp in Montana) practiced trying to walk with the two suitcases they were each allowed to take. They had to give away their collie, Laddie, who, my mother later learned, died weeks after they left him.

PHOENIX — Transporter of Stolen Migrant Children was ‘Black Contract’ Operator in Iraq and Afghanistan

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MVM secret black contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan were exposed when MVM was sued by an employee. Now in Phoenix, MVM was caught on video stashing migrant children in an abandoned office building. Photos 2 and 3: MVM advertised for youth care workers in Phoenix in June. In the photos, Native youths can be seen taking young migrant children into the black site in midtown Phoenix, including one

Key moments from Trump and May’s joint press conference – video

Murdoch will love him calling him a liar too.

Trump says his quotes in the Sun are ‘fake news’, Boris Johnson would make a great PM and the relationship between Britain and the US is ‘the highest level of special’. After Trump dismisses US immigration laws as non-existent, May says the UK has welcomed immigrants and immigration has been good for the UK

Donald Trump in the UK – live

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‘The highest level of special’: Trump praises US relationship with UK

First hand exposure to his false face, hair and lies

From Brexit and Boris to Putin and fake news, US president and Theresa May put on a show of unity after their Chequers meeting

Donald Trump’s press conference with Theresa May at Chequers lasted 50 minutes, and took in everything from transatlantic relations to immigration, Boris Johnson, attacks on the media and at least one outright lie by the US president.

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Friday Finds: Excerpt from ‘Shatila Stories’

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The magazine Refinery 29 has published an extract from Shatila Stories, a commissioned novel that was written by nine Syrian and Palestinian refugees, edited by Suhir Helal, translated by Nashwa Gowanlock, and published by Peirene Press:

It opens:

Chaos everywhere. Thundering sounds rip through my ears. I blink and blink again. I take snapshots with my eyes. Racing feet, dragging feet; old people, young people; cars of different colours, of different shapes; grey sky, swaying trees. Hundreds, thousands are waiting at the closed gate, paperwork in hand, hoping to pass through. They want to cross the border. A scene worthy of the Day of Reckoning. Worry and fear are paramount. A pallor has settled across everyone’s face, no matter how dark or fair their complexion. Desperate eyes.

You can keep reading at Refinery 29and you can also meet the nine writers in this YouTube interview: