WWII Japanese Internment Camp To Be ICE Facility

NBC News reports:

Japanese American groups criticized the construction of a new immigrant detention center in Texas at a military base that was used during World War II to imprison people of Japanese descent.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center at Fort Bliss in El Paso, which opened this past weekend, will be able to hold as many as 5,000 detainees upon its completion in the coming months, making it the largest federal detention center in U.S. history. Japanese American advocates, however, say that the facility, which once imprisoned people considered “enemy aliens,” is a chilling reminder of a dark past.

“The use of national security rhetoric to justify mass incarceration today echoes the same logic that led to their forced removal and incarceration,” said Ann Burroughs, president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. “It is inconceivable that the United States is once again building concentration camps, denying the lessons learned 80 years ago.”

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“It is inconceivable that the United States is once again building concentration camps, denying the lessons learned 80 years ago,” Ann Burroughs, president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum, said in a statement to HuffPost. https://t.co/zVOSQrIkh3

— Jonathan ‘Boo and Vote’ Cohn (@JonathanCohn) August 21, 2025

Japanese American groups slammed the construction of a new immigrant detention center in Texas at a military base that was used during World War II to imprison people of Japanese descent. https://t.co/aUTqvwCDgn

— NBC Asian America (@NBCAsianAmerica) August 20, 2025