Civil Discourse – Revisiting America’s Dark History of Internment – Joyce Vance

Revisiting America’s Dark History of Internment

By Joyce Vance, Aug 27, 2025

“The objective of this contract is to obtain all infrastructure, including temporary housing structures, physical plant, staffing, resources, services, and supplies necessary to house aliens in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in a safe and secure environment to effectuate their removal from the United States,” the 80-page document¹ on ICE’s new staging facility at Fort Bliss, Texas, starts out. But the vanilla bureaucratic language can’t hide the stark reminders of one of the worst episodes in our nation’s history, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Instead of being treated like the cautionary tale it should be, Fort Bliss is on the way to becoming another stain on our nation.

But the vanilla bureaucratic language can’t hide the stark reminders of one of the worst episodes in our nation’s history, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Instead of being treated like the cautionary tale it should be, Fort Bliss is on the way to becoming another stain on our nation.

During World War II, Americans were held at Fort Bliss in an uncomfortably small compound behind a double barbed wire fence overseen by guard towers. Internment is an ugly word. It refers to the confinement of people due to suspicions, based on nothing other than Japanese origin or ancestry, that they were a security threat after the attack on Pearl Harbor. They were never charged with a crime. They were not brought to trial and given an opportunity to defend themselves. They were incarcerated without due process.

The National World War II Museum in New Orleans explains that when the attack on Pearl Harbor happened, “about 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry lived on the US mainland, mostly along the Pacific Coast. About two thirds were full citizens, born and raised in the United States. Following the Pearl Harbor attack, however, a wave of antiJapanese suspicion and fear led the Roosevelt administration to adopt a drastic policy toward these residents, alien and citizen alike.” Virtually all Japanese Americans were forced out of their homes and incarcerated in concentration camps for the duration of the war.

The military had already arrested people it believed posed a risk. It was the public that was concerned about Japanese Americans. Two journalists fueled that fever. Walter Lippmann, a national columnist, fearmongered, warning people that “the only reason Japanese Americans had not yet been caught plotting an act of sabotage was that they were waiting to strike when it would be most effective.” Columnist Westbrook Pegler wrote that “The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.” They swayed public opinion. Internment was the result.

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1. https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2025-05/25_0423_cpo_ICE-Contract-70CDCR25D00000014-Temporary-Housing-for-Detainees.pdf ↩︎