One of the more forgotten aspects of Second World War history is the internment of foreign nationals and American citizens within the Lone Star State. These internment camps were located in five places: Crystal City, Seagoville, Kenedy, Dodd Field, and Fort Bliss. Through four Japanese American Confinement Sites Program (JACS) grants between 2009 and 2015 the Texas Historical Commission (THC) has worked to preserve the history of all five internment camps (NPS.Gov).
Pearl Harbor
December 7th, 1941, was, “…a day that shall live in infamy”. A Japanese air assault caught the American forces at Pearl Harbor completely by surprise. Five battleships, the pride of the US Navy, were sunk or severely damaged. The USS Arizona went down in a huge explosion, with 1177 officers and crew killed. The USS Oklahoma capsized, with 429 killed. And the USS California, Nevada, and West Virginia, damaged and sunk, were later re-floated to play a part in the Second World War. Three other Battleships were also damaged.
The destruction of the US Pacific Fleet went far beyond the loss of the Battleships. Eleven other ships were damaged, 348 aircraft destroyed or damaged, and 2,403 killed in the attack. The one “saving grace” for Americans; three aircraft carriers were out at sea at the time.
Up until the moment of the attack, America was divided over World War II. The battle in Europe had been going since September of 1939. While the United States gave material aid to Great Britain, generally Americans opposed getting directly involved in the battle. Japan waged a war of conquest in China since 1937, and with Europe effectively removed from the Pacific front, the United States stood as the only blockade to Japanese expansion. If they could take the US Navy “off the board”, their conquest of the Pacific could continue unfettered.
War with Japan
The attack on Pearl Harbor changed everything. As President Franklin Roosevelt correctly pointed out in his address asking for a Declaration of War, “…the American People, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory”. Congress declared war on Japan, and within days, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. America was fully “in” World War II.
There was a clear racial component to America’s reaction to war. While German Americans and Italian Americans looked like “everyone else”, Japanese Americans were easily recognized. The state of California, left vulnerable by the loss of Pearl Harbor as an effective defense, viewed every Japanese-American; man, woman and child, as a threat. That included those born in Japan, and the Nisei, American born citizens of Japanese descent. Within months, Roosevelt issued Executive Order #9066. He authorized a forced removal from the West Coast “zone”, to be held in “relocation camps”. It didn’t matter their citizenship status: Nisei or Japanese; they were rounded up. Many were held for three years in camps scattered throughout the nation.
One of the early detention camps was located at Fort Bliss, just outside El Paso, Texas.
Fort Bliss
El Paso, Texas, is a center of the migration “crisis” on the US Southern border. While the city itself enjoys a warm and cooperative relationship with Ciudad Juarez across the border in Mexico, the pressures of migration influences both towns. They are well aware of their location as a major border crossing for Central and South Americans’ trying to enter the US. And when there is no legal method to cross, those migrants become prey to “coyotes” who send them out into the surrounding desert to “cross the line” illegally.
Nearby Fort Bliss has been used to house some of those migrants in the past. The first Trump Administration temporarily housed “unaccompanied minors” there, and the Biden Administration used it as an “emergency intake center”. Today, ICE is building a huge detention facility and bringing in detainees from all over the Nation. Like Japanese-Americans, many were denied legal due-process, and simply swept off the streets and transported far from their homes.
In 1944, the US Supreme Court ruled in Korematsu v United States that Executive Order #9066 and the internment process were a “legal exercise” of Presidential authority in time of war. In fact, it took until 2018, in Trump v Hawaii, for the Supreme Court to repudiate that decision. Congress took decades to apologize as well, in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.
The Trump Administration
Donald Trump used the migrant issue as the single basis of his political rise to prominence. It was the core of his introduction, the speech at the bottom of the “golden escalator” at Trump Tower in 2015. But, during his first administration he ran into Congress and the Courts, “impeding” his desire to attack migrants here in the United States.
So when he returned in 2025, Trump successfully (at least, so far) overwhelmed opposition. He declared a “war” on Central and South American “gangs” as a predicate to action. He’s used Executive Orders, a Congress willing to relinquish authority, and an overwhelmed Federal Court system, to drive his program. Billions of US dollars are going to finance an ICE “Army”, patrolling the streets looking for so-called “illegals”. Trump’s co-conspirator, Stephen Miller, set a “quota” of 3000 arrests a day (Guardian). They have to go somewhere.
Mark Twain’s saying goes: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”. Trump is trying to recreate the racial bias of 1941, by ginning up a crisis: sending the National Guard to American cities, the ICE Army to snatch “brown people”, and now, detention centers. They are even using some of the same locations. And, for the same reason; the isolation, and the hopelessness. Fort Bliss isn’t the first, and it isn’t the biggest. But it is symbolic. From Nisei to migrants, the camps are filled and the US Constitution be-damned.
How long will it take America to apologize for this atrocity?
