Born the day before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Toshiko “Tonko” Doi of Chicago was just a baby when she and her family were forced into Japanese incarceration camps by the United States government, spending the earliest years of her life in confinement.
Her father was a Japanese immigrant. Her mother was a U.S. citizen.
Although never charged with a crime, they were among an estimated 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who were rounded up and unjustly incarcerated amid a climate of hysteria and xenophobia during World War II.
Today, Tonko Doi says she hears echoes of her family’s story in the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown, as mass detentions, deportations and turbulent protests have roiled the Chicago area and other cities across the country.
“The parallels are that the government rules the situation — prejudice rules. Legally or not, people are being incarcerated,” the 84-year-old North Center resident told the Tribune during a recent interview. “Children are being separated from their families … Because of the quotas people without criminal charges or convictions, some being U.S. citizens, are being incarcerated.”
Doi was among a crowd of roughly 80 gathered Thursday outside of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview for a vigil held on the Japanese American Day of Remembrance.
The somber annual commemoration marks the anniversary of President Franklin Roosevelt signing Executive Order 9066 in 1942, which spurred the forcible removal and mass relocation of those of Japanese descent from the West Coast.
Eighty-four years later, “Japanese Americans reflect upon the continued consequences of unchecked power and witness parallels to the experiences of forced mass removal, detention, deportation, family separation and lives lost,” said a description of the event, which was hosted by the Chicago chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League and Nikkei Uprising.
Participants raised a banner that read, “Chicago Japanese Americans say: Wrong in 1942. Wrong now.”
Signs dotting the vigil declared, “Stop repeating history” and “It’s happening again.”
The administration of President Donald Trump has denied that its immigration policies and procedures bear any resemblance to Japanese American mass incarceration, which is now widely regarded as a dark and shameful period in American history.
“This is historically illiterate. Comparisons of illegal alien detention centers to internment camps used during World War II are deranged and lazy,” said U.S. Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin in an email to the Tribune. “Entertaining this type of garbage comparrison (sic) is contributing to our officers facing a more than 1,300% increase in assaults against them.”
McLaughlin noted that Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II endured “horrible conditions” and were denied due process under a Democratic administration.
She claimed that “illegal aliens receive due process and have a choice to be there,” though this conflicts with many other reports including a federal judge who in a decision Wednesday accused the Trump administration of terrorizing immigrants and illegally denying many detainees a chance for release.
“ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens,” McLaughlin added. “Through the CBP Home App, illegal aliens who have broken the laws of our country don’t even have to choose detention, they can choose to leave now and the government will generously pay them $2,600 and provide them a free flight. Do better and get a grip.”
Numerous Japanese American organizations nationwide have repeatedly rebuked the government’s increasingly harsh immigration enforcement activity, arguing that it in many ways mirrors the discriminatory and unwarranted treatment of their ancestors decades ago.
In California, the recent 2026 Bay Area Day of Remembrance theme was “Neighbors, Not Enemies.”
The event included a panel discussion on similar threads that connect Japanese American incarceration in the 1940s with current immigration policies and tactics.
The national Japanese American Citizens League in August condemned the opening of an ICE detention center at Fort Bliss, which had been used as an incarceration camp for those of Japanese descent during World War II.
“The decision by the administration to use a former internment site as a detention center is a disgrace to the memory and legacy of the more than 125,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans unjustly imprisoned during World War II,” the group said in a statement. “While the terminology has shifted from ‘enemy alien’ to ‘illegal alien,’ the outcome remains the same: the dehumanization of entire groups of people and their mass detention without regard for the protections for all persons guaranteed under the Constitution.”
In June, more than 60 Japanese American and Asian American Pacific Islander groups filed an amicus brief opposing the Trump administration’s attempt to invoke the Alien Enemies Act — which had been used against those of Japanese descent after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor — to target Venezuelan migrants.
“As in World War II, the government’s current invocation of the Alien Enemies Act is tainted by false justifications and suppression of truthful information,” the amicus brief warned. “If the court chooses to turn a blind eye to these false justifications and attempted coverups, it will leave the door open to even greater abuses of power in the future.”
During the vigil at Broadview, Tonko Doi recounted how the incarceration camps during World War II lacked proper health care.
Her husband’s mother died at the age of 36 after giving birth to her fifth child while being forced to live at the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia, California, during the war, Tonko Doi said.
She also lamented reports of widespread health care deficiencies at ICE facilities today. A lawsuit in October described inhumane and dirty conditions at Broadview, in particular. Immigration detainees have described life inside the west suburban processing facility as dehumanizing, a Tribune investigation over the summer found.
“In 1942, those with prejudice against the Japanese agreed with what happened,” Doi told the crowd. “Eighty-four years later, in 2026, there are those among us who agree with the ICE tactics. We, the Japanese American community, do not agree.”
‘Blemish’ on the nation
The Rev. Kenji Kuramitsu of St. Paul and the Redeemer Episcopal Church in Chicago also spoke at the vigil, describing a “cruel poetry between the past and the present.”
“History doesn’t repeat. It rhymes,” he said. “And there is a shared syntax of supremacy and racial domination that affected our community then and that is being wielded against a community now.”
The priest said he grew up hearing his family’s stories of incarceration and racial targeting during World War II.
He recalled how his Uncle Clark — his grandmother’s brother, Clark Sadamu Nakamura — was forced to abruptly leave college in Sacramento to be incarcerated at Camp Tulelake in California.
“They told us they brought us to camp for our own protection,” he recalled Nakamura often saying. “Yet I would look around and see all the machine guns were pointing at us, inside the fences. I knew they were lying about what it meant to be there.”
Despite this treatment, Nakamura volunteered for active combat duty during World War II, defending the nation that had disrupted his education and wrongfully taken away his freedom.
He joined the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed of Japanese Americans, which went on to become one of the most decorated units in military history.
Kuramitsu said he sees many links between the experiences of Japanese Americans decades ago and those afflicted by immigration enforcement in the present.
He noted that Japanese Americans were rounded up by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the agency that’s a precursor to modern-day ICE.
“What is wrong is wrong,” Kuramitsu said at the vigil. “What happened … then was wrong, not because two-thirds of them held a scrap of paper that said ‘citizen’ on it. It was wrong because it is wrong to take human beings like this.”
In September, one of Kuramitsu’s parishioners — a Venezuelan asylum-seeker — was detained by immigration officials in the Little Village neighborhood and held for roughly six weeks in an ICE facility in northern Michigan, according to court records.
The priest recalled visiting the parishioner in detention.
While traveling there and entering the facility, Kuramitsu’s thoughts drifted back to his Uncle Clark, who had died at the age of 101 in 2020.
“Those parallels were screaming as I visited our parishioner,” he said.
The parishioner was released in October.
“His pew is no longer empty at church,” the priest said.
Kuramitsu believes that if Nakamura were alive today, he would see the same ties that bind history and current events.
“I would like to think he would want us to be aware of where the guns are pointed right now — on vulnerable communities here,” the priest added during an interview with the Tribune. “It’s really hard for me to imagine that if he saw the detention facility where our friend and parishioner was taken to, he wouldn’t have immediately thought about Tulelake and how crushing it was to be subjected to that. And what a blemish that left on his life — and on our country.”
Caring for the dead and the living
President Ronald Reagan in 1988 signed a law that issued a formal apology and authorized reparations to Japanese American incarceration survivors.
“For here we admit a wrong; here we reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law,” the Republican president said during remarks.
Yet for many families, the scars of incarceration remained, with rippling effects across generations.
At the vigil, Scott Sakiyama of west suburban Oak Park said the government forced many of his relatives to leave their homes 84 years ago, when they were incarcerated at Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona.
In some respects, his family was fortunate, he recalled. A neighbor had kept their land and gave it back when they returned.
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But his great-grandfather died by suicide after coming home, Sakiyama said.
“The family understood that he felt it was too much to start over,” he added.
Growing up, his relatives didn’t talk about what had happened to them during World War II.
He said his father, who was born after the war’s end and had not been incarcerated with his relatives, “always felt at a distance from the rest of the family, and he never understood why.”
Several years ago, Sakiyama took a trip with his dad to the site at Gila River, traveling to the exact location of the barracks where their family members had been detained years ago.
“Standing in the desert, I could picture them,” he said. “And my dad said going there helped him understand and have some peace.”
Sakiyama went on to tie that ancestral trauma to the severe and often violent local immigration clampdown, dubbed Operation Midway Blitz.
The 46-year-old attorney frequently protests at Broadview and also volunteers as a rapid responder, reporting on federal agents’ activities in neighborhoods.
Sakiyama has said he’s been drawn to immigration advocacy because of his Japanese American heritage and his family’s incarceration decades ago.
In a high-profile case, Sakiyama was arrested by federal agents near his daughter’s Oak Park school in October.
“The ICE vehicle stopped, backed up very close to my car. Two agents jumped out — they had their guns drawn,” Sakiyama, a U.S. citizen, told the Tribune shortly afterward. “They told me to step out of the car or they were going to smash my windows.”
Federal agents drove around with Sakiyama handcuffed in their back seat after alleging he had cut off their van in traffic; he was released later that day.
Sakiyama said he had trailed behind their vehicle while following from Broadview to Oak Park, later blowing a whistle and honking his car horn to warn neighbors that immigration agents were present.
Sakiyama was accused of “cutting off (an) agent’s vehicle” and “impeding (a) federal officer,” according to a citation he was issued.
That citation was dismissed in January, according to federal court records.
A Tribune investigation in December revealed the majority of immigration agents’ claims against U.S. citizens amid Operation Midway Blitz have fallen apart in court, resulting in either no charges or dropped charges.
Lisa Doi of the Hyde Park neighborhood said around this time of year she thinks of her great-grandmother who died during World War II while incarcerated at Rohwer War Relocation Center, a 500-acre camp once encircled by barbed wire and armed guards in Arkansas.
“What it meant for her to die in prison. What it meant to end her life in confinement and not get to experience freedom with the rest of her family,” said Lisa Doi, who is not related to Tonko Doi. “I know there are people who are still experiencing that today.”
Hosting the vigil was “a practice of caring for the spirits of the dead,” she said.
“Taking action in the present is also the way we honor the dead and console the spirits of the dead,” said Lisa Doi, who serves as civil rights committee chair of the Japanese American Citizens League Chicago. “To say that this is an active and ongoing thing. That people are still living with the same fear and experiencing these same forms of detention. That people every day are being brought to Broadview and held there.”
This includes taking action to stop injustice today, she added.
“To me, this is (another) way we can honor the dead on this Day of Remembrance,” she said.