In a climate of fear and suspicion following the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, authorizing the War Department to create “military zones.” Those military zones would be overseen by the secretary of war, given broad powers to decide the “right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave” those zones. In March 1942, Congress passed a law codifying the executive order and in May, people of Japanese descent were rounded up and shipped to internment camps.
Tens of thousands of West Coast residents were given almost no warning to ready themselves to be shipped off to points unknown. Many of them lost everything — their homes, their farms, their businesses, their bank accounts and almost all of their worldly possessions. Of the more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent sent to internment camps, about two-thirds were citizens of the United States. Some had been in the U.S. for multiple generations.
West of Delta, Utah, lies a testament to a time when Americans were driven by fear and racial prejudice. The Topaz Internment Camp Site housed over 11,000 people in the three years of its existence. While people were detained there, it was the fifth-largest city in Utah. The first 8,000 detainees arrived at Topaz in September 1942 and came from the Tanforan Racetrack in San Bruno, California, where they had already been detained in converted horse stalls for six months.
Initially, Utah’s governor at the time, Herbert B. Maw, was opposed to the internment camp, but eventually allowed it because the state needed workers for sugar beet farms, according to the “I Love Utah History” government website.
One of the residents of the Topaz Internment Camp was Fred Korematsu. Korematsu had been living in California when Executive Order 9066 was issued and refused to relocate. He was jailed and convicted of violating the order. He appealed and his case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court that ruled 6-3 in 1944 that the exclusion order was lawful. In 1983, a U.S. district court judge in California overturned his conviction after learning the federal government had suppressed information showing Japanese Americans, in fact, had not posed a threat.
Rep. Celeste Maloy has introduced legislation that would posthumously award Korematsu with the Congressional Gold Medal. He died in 2005.
In 1980, a bipartisan federal commission was directed by Congress to review the facts and circumstances around Executive Order 9066 and its impacts on American citizens and permanent legal residents. In December 1982, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians released a unanimous 467-page report on that dark period in our country’s history. The report became a book titled “Personal Justice Denied,” and found “the broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria and failure of political leadership.”
In 2022, to mark the 80th anniversary of the opening of the Topaz Internment Camp, the Utah Capitol featured an exhibit of artwork, photographs, artifacts and stories from the years of the camp. The “Topaz Stories” exhibit was supported by Friends of Topaz and the Topaz Museum, plus numerous state entities, including the Utah Department of Cultural & Community Engagement, the Utah Division of Arts & Museums, the Capitol Preservation Board, the Governor’s Office, and the Utah House and Senate.
At the reception kicking off the months-long exhibit, Utah Senate President Stuart Adams commented on the diversity of the crowd, praising Utahns for their tolerance and respect for all peoples. “We do more together in Utah than we ever do apart,” Adams said.
Ruth Sasaki, the editor of “Topaz Stories,” said the survivors’ remembrances are more important than ever, given contemporary incidents of injustice and violence against minorities. “It can happen again. I think they are happening again,” she said in 2022.
Indeed. Today, the current administration is talking about massive detention centers to hold migrants, and potentially their families, prior to deportation. This proposed move has some clear differences with Topaz, which housed U.S. citizens of Japanese decent. The Trump administration proposal would be to have detention centers for those in the country illegally. Yet such centers certainly bring echoes of that time. Today’s efforts come after attempts to end birthright citizenship, to strip legal status from over a million immigrants who are (were) documented from Venezuela and Haiti, instructing ICE to deport unaccompanied migrant children, and removing the acting ICE director because deportations aren’t happening fast enough.
This weekend, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration is ramping up plans to use U.S. military bases as detention centers, beginning with Fort Bliss in Texas. The Fort Bliss site could eventually hold up to 10,000 people who are in the U.S. without appropriate documentation, and would serve as a model to develop more detention center sites across the U.S. One potential site is Hill Air Force Base in northern Utah.
Gil Kerlikowske, the former commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said military facilities are not designed for a project like this. “It’s beyond odd,” Kerlikowske said.
When asked about the possibility of Hill Air Force Base being used for a detention center, Sen. John Curtis said, “Hill Air Force Base is a cornerstone of our national defense, playing a vital role in sustaining the readiness of our Armed Forces and strengthening our strategic deterrence capabilities. Its mission is critical, and we must ensure nothing detracts from its core responsibilities.”
Gov. Spencer Cox recently reaffirmed his support for the Utah Compact and has also said he will support President Donald Trump’s deportation plans for immigrants living in the country illegally that have committed crimes and who pose a threat to public safety. His office also told the Deseret News that the governor is in touch with Hill AFB leadership and they have not received any direction or requests from the federal government at this point.
As the mother of a U.S. citizen born in Guatemala who now feels that she must carry papers with her to prove her legal status, I hope that Utah never again becomes a place where we round people up and detain them in “camps” for unspecified periods of time.
We need more than hope. We need action. We need to let our elected officials know how we feel. We need to advocate for humane and compassionate immigration policies. We need to speak up and speak out, especially when other voices are being silenced. We can support organizations working to protect immigrant rights and promote public awareness through education and historical context. We can share stories like those of the Japanese internment to highlight the dangers of racial prejudice and fear-driven policies. And we can love our neighbors — all of our neighbors. Even the ones who don’t look like us.
Originally published in the Deseret News
