From the passenger seat of a sky blue Prius, Amy Oba craned her neck to get a look at the federal detention center, a hulking tower surrounded by a black chain-link fence and laced with barbed wire. On a recent evening, she was on patrol, part of a group of Japanese Americans who are keeping a watchful eye on the actions of immigration agents in Los Angeles.
“I definitely think about my family when we organize, when we go out on patrols, because that could have been my family in prison,” said Ms. Oba, 33. “It’s just a difference of what, like, 80 years?”
During World War II, Ms. Oba’s grandparents were among the more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who were forced by the federal government to live for years in remote, hastily constructed internment camps across the West.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, backed by the Supreme Court, treated the Japanese Americans as national security threats because of their ethnicity. Families left behind communities, businesses, homes and even pets. Some of them never returned. It wasn’t until the Reagan administration that the government apologized and said it would pay compensation to families who were affected.
Now, as the Trump administration carries out its immigration crackdown, Japanese Americans see chilling similarities to what their families experienced.
The federal government’s current efforts have focused on arresting and deporting Latinos who don’t have legal status in the United States. That contrasts with the situation in the 1940s, when most of the Japanese Americans held in detention camps were U.S. citizens.
But to many Japanese Americans, the images of uniformed federal agents ushering people onto buses, the mass detentions and the dehumanizing language used by government officials stir collective memories of the trauma faced by their own parents and grandparents.
Lisa Doi, 34, a board member of the Japanese American Citizens League’s chapter in Chicago, said that people who showed up to a recent event to connect community members with local rapid response networks were already seeing the parallels.
“I think the thing people most appreciated was having next steps,” she said.
Japanese Americans tend to support Democrats at the polls and did so in the 2024 election, according to AAPI Data, a research organization focused on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. But this year, some have taken more concrete action to oppose the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Japanese American groups have filed an amicus brief contesting President Trump’s recent invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, a law that was also used to justify the imprisonment of Japanese Americans. They have denounced as a disgrace the government’s mass detention of immigrants at Fort Bliss, a former internment camp for Japanese Americans in Texas.
As a surge of federal agents put immigrant communities on edge in Chicago, Japanese American organizers marched, documented arrests and lined streets around schools to help protect parents who were afraid to pick up their children.
In Dublin, Calif., near San Francisco, camp survivors and Japanese taiko drummers rallied in July to oppose the proposed reopening of a federal prison to hold immigrants.
The alliance between Americans of Japanese and Mexican descents has been particularly strong in Los Angeles. Both include people who came to the United States with very little, worked as landscapers, cooks and farmers, and settled in urban neighborhoods where they were confined by redlining.
“Our neighborhood was diverse, our schools were diverse, so we had a chance to make friendships and share those stories,” said Senator Alex Padilla of California, who recalled growing up alongside children of immigrants from around the world in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley.
Mr. Padilla said something else bonded Japanese Americans and Latinos: Both groups understand what it means to be “scapegoated and villainized.”
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, did not respond to a request for comment.
But in a statement to other news outlets in August, she said the agency was targeting the worst criminals for immigration enforcement. “Comparisons of illegal alien detention centers to internment camps used during World War II are deranged and lazy,” she told them.
Ms. Oba and her partner, Nicole Suzuki, are part of Nikkei Progressives, a group founded by Japanese American activists in 2016 to push for immigrant rights. The group has raised money for undocumented immigrants affected by Los Angeles’s devastating wildfires and has served as advocates for migrants held at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Adelanto, a desert community about 80 miles outside Los Angeles.
And as the Trump administration stepped up immigration raids across Southern California this year, the group started patrolling.
Ms. Suzuki, 28, said it was important to make sure that agents know that residents are watching what they do. On their weekly drives, Ms. Oba and Ms. Suzuki look out for unmarked vans, trucks with dark tinted windows or agents gathering behind the federal detention center.
“I think a lot of people lose hope that they have the power, that they can do anything about what’s happening,” Ms. Suzuki said. “But no — they could drive around their neighborhood every now and then and keep an eye out.”
Japanese American groups have also rallied against what they say is the Trump administration’s attempt to erase their history.
The Japanese American National Museum — built on a site where Japanese Americans were ordered to report for removal — lost a $170,000 educational grant as part of the Trump administration’s cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Bill Fujioka, who leads the museum’s board of trustees, said that although many Japanese American leaders have been less outspoken on political issues in the past, the group was determined to speak out now. “This is our community’s legacy,” he said.
Mr. Fujioka, 73, said that his grandfather first landed in Mexico and walked to the United States from Zacatecas, tracing a path not unlike many Latin Americans.
“If anybody came to America, they didn’t leave a good situation,” he said. “They came here with hope. Every immigrant shares that dream.”
To Latino immigrant rights leaders, Japanese Americans have been both allies and examples.
Angelica Salas, the executive director of CHIRLA, one of the leading immigrant rights groups in the state, cited stories of Mexican Californians watching over the property of their Japanese neighbors. There was also the case of Ralph Lazo, a Mexican American teenager who was the only known person who wasn’t of Japanese ancestry to report to the camps, in solidarity with his classmates.
Now, Ms. Salas said, Japanese American groups have been returning the support through rapid response networks and efforts to educate the public about their history.
“They remind everybody that we aren’t enemies. We are just people living our lives, running businesses,” she said.
That has held true, even when Little Tokyo was caught in the middle of clashes between protesters and law enforcement officers.
In June, when demonstrators were protesting immigration raids and Mr. Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles, law enforcement officers pushed them into Little Tokyo, which is right next to City Hall and the federal detention center. While the vast majority of the protesters were peaceful, when night fell, vandals broke windows and ransacked stores. Buildings, including the Japanese American museum, were heavily tagged.
Rumi Fujimoto, 54, said that vandals smashed the front window at her family’s store, a neighborhood mainstay full of Dodgers gear and memorabilia dedicated to Shohei Ohtani. About $1,500 of rare merchandise was stolen.
Ms. Fujimoto blamed the president for sending National Guard troops, not the city’s Latino communities or protesters.
“People are like, ‘aren’t you mad?’” she said, standing in front of her shop, whose window was still boarded up. “I’m like, ‘yeah, I’m mad, but this wasn’t created by la Raza,’” using a Spanish term for the Mexican American community.
Weeks after the protests, more than a dozen heavily armed and camouflage-clad Border Patrol agents crowded into the plaza outside the Japanese American museum as Gov. Gavin Newsom held a rally inside for Proposition 50, his effort to persuade California voters to redraw congressional districts.
Ms. Fujimoto heard the commotion and tore out of the store, shouting that immigration agents were there. “I felt like Paul Revere,” she recalled.
Jill Cowan is a Times reporter based in Los Angeles, covering the forces shaping life in Southern California and throughout the state.
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