Live community event: Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order – Live Community Event (Dec 30, 2025)

Main Theme & Purpose

This special live episode of "Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order" (recorded at the historic Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles) gathers historians, activists, survivors’ descendants, and elected officials to discuss the legacy of Japanese American mass incarceration during WWII—and draw urgent connections to contemporary immigrant detentions and civil rights threats. Through personal stories, expert insights, and audience Q&A, the episode stresses the enduring need for resistance, solidarity, and historical truth-telling in the face of government abuse.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Opening Reflections: Parallels Past and Present

[02:15–07:30] Rachel Maddow

• Welcomes a packed Orpheum Theater, encouraging the audience to make personal connections, echoing a theme of analog community as a form of resistance.
• Ties the Orpheum's 1941 marquee (a steadfast community landmark) to nearby Little Tokyo’s experience of government-enforced racial decrees in 1942.
• Details the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans—“not detained, not interned, but incarcerated”—with disturbing specificity: families losing homes, forced to live in horse stalls, then shipped to camps.

Memorable Quote:

“The immoral clarity of that, that today is as bright and distinctive as it has ever been. … They were not detained there. … They were incarcerated there against their will for years.”
— Rachel Maddow, [04:30]

• Draws parallels to modern-day immigrant detention: Fort Bliss (TX), once a WWII incarceration camp, is now site of the country’s largest immigrant prison camp under recent administrations.
• Notes the secrecy and lack of accountability at current camps, drawing clear lines to past abuses—the “legal black box” on military bases.

2. Historical Connection: 1940s Incarceration & Today’s ICE Raids

[07:52–13:05] Rachel Maddow

• Recalls 1942 raids and the conversion of Buddhist temples into assembly points for forced removal; today, that temple is the Japanese American National Museum.
• Relays a recent incident where masked agents swarmed that historic site while California Gov. Gavin Newsom was speaking, and Little Tokyo residents organized to chase ICE out (including activist Rumi Fujimoto: "I felt like Paul Revere that day").
• Celebrates Angeleno resistance—food deliveries, protests, civil disobedience, eg. "one finger salutes"—as a direct legacy of Japanese American resilience and solidarity.

Memorable Quote:

“You have not taken any of this lying down. You have chased ICE vehicles out of your neighborhoods with bullhorns… This disaster is very much manmade.”
— Rachel Maddow, [15:10]

• Introduces Nikkei Progressives’ activism and Amy Oba, connecting her family’s 1940s incarceration history to her present-day organizing: “It’s just a difference of what, like, 80 years?”

3. Panel Introduction and Lived Experience

[21:42–24:12] Rachel Maddow

• Introduces expert panel:
  • Dr. Satsuki Ina—psychotherapist, Tule Lake-born survivor, co-founder of Tsuru for Solidarity.
  • Frank Abe—journalist, son of Heart Mountain incarceree, writer, early “Day of Remembrance” organizer.
  • Professor Laurie Binai—descendant of Santa Anita/Manzanar survivors, lead attorney in overturning Fred Korematsu’s conviction.

4. The Mechanisms and Politics of Incarceration

[24:12–28:15] Prof. Laurie Binai & Frank Abe

• Laurie Binai explains that mass incarceration rested atop long-standing exclusion: citizenship bans, land ownership prohibitions, anti-miscegenation laws, segregated schooling, and othering. Pearl Harbor simply provided the fuel.
• Frank Abe ties the persistent suspicion and racism post-war (“you must have done something wrong or you wouldn’t have been put in camp”) to the continuing need for restitution and narrative change.

Memorable Quote:

“So when we were growing up, it was a question of asking our parents… Why did you go along? Why didn’t you resist? And the answer was, the country was against us.”
— Frank Abe, [26:52]

5. Then and Now: Public Response, Shame, and Resistance

[28:15–30:59] Dr. Satsuki Ina

• Dr. Ina reflects on the almost total absence of protest from non-Japanese Americans in the 1940s and the emotional legacy of that silence.
• Shares Tsuru for Solidarity’s mission: for survivors and descendants to be “the people we needed" then, showing up at modern detention sites as former child prisoners, standing up for today’s families: “not now, not again—stop repeating history.”

6. Legal Legacy: Korematsu Case and Ongoing Dangers

[31:43–34:27] Prof. Laurie Binai

• Discusses the continuing danger of Korematsu: the Supreme Court's extreme deference to executive claims of “national security” remains unoverturned, manifest in abuses from WWII to the modern Muslim Ban.

Memorable Quote:

“One of the most frightening things about Korematsu that still persists today is… the court said we only have to ask whether there’s some rational basis for this.”
— Prof. Laurie Binai, [32:16]

• Frank Abe recounts historical efforts to denaturalize and “self-deport” Japanese Americans, linking them to recent attempts to strip citizenship from immigrants and their children.

7. What Does Solidarity and Healing Look Like?

[37:20–39:23] Dr. Satsuki Ina

• Solidarity is found in small acts: speaking up, feeding neighbors, showing kindness, and especially, “finding the voice we didn’t have” back then.
• Resistance, even if difficult or symbolic, brings healing—defying officers at detention sites as elders felt “a healing, finding the voice that we didn’t have back when we were incarcerated.”

8. Redress and the Risk of Forgetting

[39:23–42:14] Frank Abe & Prof. Binai

• Frank Abe: “Never again” after redress became “never again is now.”
• Laurie Binai stresses the broader meaning of “never again”: not just mass incarcerations, but any scapegoating or singling out of minority groups.

9. Language and Naming the Experience

[49:05–51:26] Audience Q&A & Panelists

• Question about the importance of accurate language—"incarceration camps" vs. "internment camps."
• Dr. Ina and others stress how euphemism minimized trauma and protected perpetrators. Accepting proper terms (incarceration, imprisonment) respects the lived experience and drives truth-based education.

Memorable Quote:

“So much of the government’s effort to hide and distort what they did to us started with the language, the euphemistic language used to minimize…”
— Dr. Satsuki Ina, [49:15]

10. Intergenerational Trauma and Healing

[51:53–54:52] Dr. Satsuki Ina

• Audience question about trauma among camp survivors’ descendants.
• Dr. Ina shares clinical perspective: trauma often transmits non-verbally; survivor parents’ silences mask intense vigilance, performance anxieties, and fear-driven pressure for achievement on children.

Memorable Quote:

“Trauma has a way of getting communicated mostly non‑verbally… My parents lived in great fear after their release because they were afraid that anything that we might do could put us back in prison again.”
— Dr. Satsuki Ina, [53:27]

11. The Danger of Societal Silence and Lessons for Today

[55:06–57:50] Audience Q&A & Panelists

• Authoritarianism “rarely arrives with tanks” but through paperwork and quiet compliance. What forms of societal silence are most dangerous now?

• Frank Abe quotes Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen:

  “If you want to know what you would have done when Japanese Americans were… incarcerated in WWII, now you know—it’s what you’re doing now.”
  — [55:50]

• Maddow and Binai comment: refusing to seek “perfect victims” (to justify standing up for civil rights), amplifying survivor lessons, and spreading the moral conversation are key anti-silence tactics.

---

Notable Audience Q&A Segments

The Importance of Language

• Audience history teacher asks about the changing terminology (“incarceration” vs. “internment”).
• Dr. Ina, Frank Abe, and Prof. Binai stress the critical power of naming and rejecting euphemisms.

Multi-generational Trauma

• An audience member whose husband is a camp descendant asks about unique symptoms.
• Dr. Ina details the silence, overachievement pressure, and deep-seated fear transferred from camp survivors to their children.

Combating Modern Compliance and Quiescence

• Audience: “What form of societal silence do you see as most dangerous?”
• Response: Active bystander engagement, humanizing news coverage (resisting “perfect victim” tropes), and continuous, small acts of solidarity.

---

Timestamps for Segment Highlights

• Opening, context, Fort Bliss parallel: [02:15–10:00]
• Little Tokyo & ICE resistance: [10:00–15:00]
• Introduction of panelists & descendancy: [21:42–24:12]
• Historical context of exclusion: [24:12–25:55] (Laurie Binai)
• Politics of racism & redress: [25:55–28:15] (Frank Abe)
• Protest then vs. now, meaning of activism: [28:15–30:59] (Dr. Ina)
• Korematsu and legal dangers: [31:43–34:27] (Binai, Maddow)
• Solidarity in action, healing through protest: [37:20–39:23] (Dr. Ina)
• Language, naming, and education: [49:05–51:26]
• Audience Qs on trauma: [51:53–54:52]
• Societal silence and activism: [55:06–57:50]
• Audience and community recognition: [43:27–46:12]

---

Calls to Action & Policy Connections

• Direct Solidarity: Members of Nikkei Progressives share on-the-ground efforts to spot ICE raids, distribute know your rights guides, and develop rapid response networks—linking the role of Japanese American community memory to current immigrant protection.
• Leadership and Mutual Aid: Mayor Gordo recounts his own immigrant background and need for community-based safeguards for families at risk (“Folgers coffee can” story at [72:59]).
• Legislative Response: Rep. Mark Takano outlines a proposed bill prohibiting detention based on race/nationality, noting both the continuity (and failure) of post-Reagan era promises, and the need for broad coalition and public pressure.

---

Threats, Lessons & Warnings

• The loaded weapon of Korematsu—unchecked deference to executive “national security” claims—remains legally dangerous ([31:43–34:27]).
• Repeated scapegoating of minority groups and normalization of detentions/regulatory cruelty (“self-deportation,” black sites, family separation) are recurring patterns—never again is now ([39:23–42:14]).

---

Quotes to Remember

• On historical parallels:
  “If this feels familiar, it may be because this same site, Fort Bliss, was also the site of a hastily constructed incarceration camp for immigrants 83 years ago during World War II. Same place.”
  — Rachel Maddow, [09:50]

• On legal legacy:
  “Korematsu stands as a loaded weapon. … One of the most frightening things … is that the Court said we only have to ask whether there’s some rational basis.”
  — Prof. Laurie Binai, [31:43]

• On how to show up:
  “It doesn’t have to be all the grand, big national things. It is even the small actions that create solidarity … whether it’s food or accompaniment to the courts, whether it’s speaking up at demonstrations, it’s being kind to each other.”
  — Dr. Satsuki Ina, [37:37]

• On intergenerational resistance:
  “It’s what we’re doing now.”
  — Quoting Viet Thanh Nguyen, [55:50]

---

Tone and Spirit

• Candid, urgent, persistently hopeful: Maddow’s hosting leans on gallows humor, direct address, and gratitude to guests and community.
• Panelists blend sober warnings about dangerous legal precedents with insistence on agency, activism, and mutual aid—even for those not directly affected.
• Audience participation is highly valued, and survivor presence is honored. The event ends with a charge to act courageously now, for the sake of future generations.

---

Final Reflections

• “Never again” is not a guarantee but a continual call to resistance.
• Truth-telling, proper naming, and collective action—large or small—remain essential for justice and dignity.
• The story of WWII incarceration is not “over”; it’s a living warning and a call for solidarity across generations and communities.

---

Transcript

[Commercial Announcer]

Now is your time to get into a new Dr. Horton home by taking advantage of its national red tag sales event. This Friday, January 2nd through Sunday, January 25th, stop by any of its participating communities and find select red tag homes at incredible pricing. So whether you're buying your first home or looking for an upgrade, you don't want to miss the red tag sales event. Starting this Friday, discover the Dr. Horton Difference. Tap your screen now or visit drhorton.com Dr. Horton, America's Builder and Equal Housing Opportunity Builder.

[Panelist/Activist]

The McDonald's Snack Wrap is back.

[Rachel Maddow]

You brought it back.

[Panelist/Activist]

Ranch snack wrap. Spicy snack wrap.

[Rachel Maddow]

You broke the Internet for a snack.

[Panelist/Activist]

Snack wrap is back.

[Rachel Maddow]

Japanese Americans, almost entirely without help, found ways to survive and to resist in their own way. Not just in that moment, but also for decades afterwards. And we see their legacy on the streets of LA today. What's up la? What's up L. A? Good evening, good evening, good evening. Welcome to the show. My name is Jacob Soboroff from Ms.

[Panelist/Activist]

Now.

[Rachel Maddow]

We are all so very, very, very glad that you are here. And I don't know about you guys, but I have learned so much, so much from Rachel's podcast Burn Order. There is no story more central to the American experience than the story of mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans. And tonight we are going to meet some of the people who are in the podcast who know this history like nobody else. It's going to be a great night. And now, because I cannot wait one minute more, please join me in welcoming to the stage my friend, my colleague, the host of the event, the great Rachel Maddow.

[Panelist/Activist]

Thank you.

[Rachel Maddow]

Have fun. Thanks, man. Thank you. Thank you. Oh w. I am very happy to see you all. Thank you. Hi you guys. Hi. Woo hoo. Wow, there's so many people here. I'm now going to put on my reading glasses so I can't see because you make me nervous. Yeah. Thank you all so, so, so much for. Oh yeah, that's better. Now you're all a blur. This is good. It is great to see you. It is great to be here at the beautiful Orpheum Theater. Thank you. You know, I'm gonna put my other glasses on. I like seeing you. That's better. Yes. You're an unusually good looking group. Actually, let me just say before we get going, I don't know how many people you came here with tonight. Like, I don't know how many people were in your Uber or whatever, but before you leave here tonight, meet somebody new. Just say hi to somebody who you haven't met. Before. Before you leave, you have one thing in common, right? Find a stranger, make eye contact, say, hello, I'm a Catholic. At Catholic Mass, we do this peace be with you thing. This is the moment to do peace be with you whether or not you touch. All right. See? Don't you feel better already? Yes. The future is analog. I'm telling you. The more we know each other offline, the safer and better off we're all going to be. So the marquee, the beautiful Orpheum Theater marquee you all passed under to enter into the theater tonight, that marquee is just an LA classic. You can't really imagine this part of the city without it. As bright and distinctive as it is today as it's ever been. That sign on the front of this theater has been lighting up Broadway for 84 years, was put up in 1941. And within a year of that sign going up, just up the road from here in Little Tokyo, Japanese Americans were subjected to a racial decree from the U.S. army. And without warrants, without hearings, without any probable cause, they were taken from their homes, whole families taken from their homes. They were forced to sell almost everything they owned. They were told they could take only. Only what they could carry. And they went to assembly centers where they were held, in some cases, in horse stalls. And then they were taken on eventually to incarceration camps. And they were not detained there. They were not interned there. They were incarcerated there against their will for years. And that the. What I think of, I guess, as the immoral clarity of that, that today is as bright and distinctive as it has ever been. Just like that marquee. And it's maybe even more bright and more distinctive today. This is Fort Bliss, Texas. Fort Bliss is a real fort, a historic and continuing installation of the United States Army. It's just outside El Paso, Texas. See how El Paso scoots up on it like that. Today, Fort Bliss is the site of the largest immigrant prison in the country. The Trump administration put up a hastily constructed tent camp there this summer. It's been growing ever since. They've got just under 3,000 people there right now. The White House has said proudly they plan to keep adding more. They say they have built room for 5,000. But just look at that photo for a second. I will tell you, you have not seen a lot of photos like this. This photo is hard to get. We got this photo. We just got this photo from. We bought it from a longtime Texas photographer who's an army veteran, who has been documenting the expansion of this Immigrant prison camp at Fort Bliss in the Texas desert. He took this aerial shot less than two weeks ago. And as you can see there, there's these long rows of what appear to be sort of semi permanent white tents and they've taken over this entire section of the base. I will tell you that's the closest we can get to seeing what's going on side, but we are starting to get some information.

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

The ACLU and the Texas Civil Rights.

[Professor Laurie Binay]

And Human Rights Watch sent a letter.

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

To U.S. iCE officials earlier today detailing.

[Professor Laurie Binay]

Accounts horrific conditions, including alleged beatings, medical.

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

Neglect, insufficient food and sexual abuse by officers against detained migrants.

[Commercial Announcer]

What happens inside the nation's largest migrant.

[Rachel Maddow]

Detention site and why are advocates sounding the alarm? Well, new allegations from detainees at Camp East Montana point to abuse, unsafe conditions and struggles to reach attorneys. The ACLU calls it a warning as federal officials push back saying conditions are humane because this is on a military base. They may be hoping that this site at Fort Bliss is essentially off the radar of both the public and the Constitution. It is difficult for people who are locked up at this site to speak to lawyers. It is hard for any of us to know what the process is that got the people who are there locked up there. It is hard for us to know who's in charge. It's on a military base but operated by a private contractor. Nobody admits that they are accountable to the public in terms of letting anybody know what the conditions are. It's hard to get photos of what it looks like from the outside, let alone to find out who is inside a black site, a legal black box in America in the middle of the desert. And if this feels familiar, it may be because this same site, Fort Bliss, was also the site of a hastily constructed incarceration camp for immigrants 83 years ago during World War II. Same place. This is Terminal Island. This is about 25 miles south of where we are tonight in Los Angeles. Over the summer, immigration agents used Terminal island as a staging area for their raids across la. When we saw those masked federal agents jumping out of unmarked cars and grabbing people off the streets in la, those agents started their operation at Terminal Island. This is Terminal Island a little over 80 years ago when it was a fishing village home to thousands of Japanese immigrants and US born Japanese Americans. In February 1942, the people who lived on Terminal island were among the first Japanese Americans on the west coast to be forced out of their homes. They were rounded up and sent to prison camps. Their thriving fishing village there and everybody's homes there were bulldozed. This is the corner of first street and Central Avenue in Little Tokyo. This is less than two miles from here. In 1942, this corner was home to a Buddhist temple. And invoking the Alien Enemies act, which you've heard a lot about this year, the FBI arrested most of the staff at that temple and sent them to various prison camps from that temple. The one person who worked there who remained, the one person who was left alone was one Buddhist minister with the classically Japanese name, so forgive my pronunciation here if I get it wrong, his name was Julius Goldwater. He was not Japanese, which is why he was left. He actually was a first cousin to the future arch conservative Republican presidential candidate and senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater. But because Julius Goldwater was not Japanese, he was the one who was left behind at the temple when everybody else was taken. And then when he was left behind, he did what he could to at least safeguard the possessions of his Japanese American friends and colleagues who were rounded up. He at least tried to safeguard their homes personally as best he could. He was one of the very, very, very few non Japanese American allies who stepped up to help when the widespread arrests and seizures of property right after Pearl harbor expanded to a policy targeting not just so called alien enemies, but targeting all people of Japanese descent, a racial decree. That temple at the corner of first and Central is where ordinary Japanese Americans, whole families, whole families were ordered to assemble, to be put on buses, to be relocated, as they said, relocated to the camps. Today the temple is the site of the Japanese American National Museum. And just a few months ago, California's Governor Gavin Newsom was giving a speech inside that museum, specifically inside the Democracy center at that museum, when masked, heavily armed federal agents swarmed the plaza outside and then started mugging for the cameras. We're here making Los Angeles a safer place. Since we won't have politicians that'll do that, we do that ourselves. So that's what we're here today, as you can see, already making it a safer place. We're glad to be here, not going anywhere.

[Panelist/Activist]

And you know the governor's inside right there.

[Rachel Maddow]

I didn't, I don't know where he's at.

[Panelist/Activist]

He's about 100ft behind us.

[Rachel Maddow]

When that happened, When that happened, when all those masked federal agents showed up on Democracy Plaza in August, Angeleno named Rumi Fujimoto was at the counter of her family's store in Little Tokyo, a store where they sell every imaginable variety of the coolest Dodgers merch you have ever seen in your life. And Ms. Fujimoto heard the commotion. She later told the New York Times that she just, without thinking, just tore out of her store, started shouting to everyone that the immigration agents were there, trying to warn her neighbors. She told the Times, I felt like Paul Revere that day. That same day, you saw all of those people, you saw all of those Angelenos chanting ICE out of la, chanting ICE out of la, and then making sure that it happened, pushing those federal agents back, taunting them down the block as they turned tail and left Los Angeles. God bless you. You have not taken any of this lying down. You have chased ICE vehicles out of your neighborhoods with bullhorns. You have delivered food to your neighbors who are afraid to leave their homes. You have marched and protested and shouted and jeered and given one finger salutes and swore and made the federal government's shambolic shows of force look petty and small. You have declared a countywide state of emergency to help people and protect people the same way you would if their lives had been upended by some terrible natural disaster. Although this disaster is very much man made. Louisiana, you have been a force to be reckoned with. You are helping yourselves. You are helping your country. You have been a force to be reckoned with. You have endured and outlasted this attack on your city just as you will the next one. It's still happening. It is still happening, and you have been here before. Back then, when the American government began sweeping up people across LA based solely and explicitly on their race, Japanese Americans, almost entirely without help, found ways to survive and to resist in their own way. Not just in that moment, but also for decades afterwards. And we see their legacy on the streets of LA today. We see it in members of the group Nikkei Progressives driving around town, keeping a watchful eye out for immigration agents. Amy Oba's grandparents were among the more than 125,000 Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in this country simply because of their race during World War II. Amy recently told the New York Times, she said, quote, I definitely think about my family when we organize, when we go out on patrols, because that could have been my family in prison. It's just a difference of what, like, 80 years? So that's what we're here to talk about tonight. We are going to meet people whose families were affected directly by the mass incarceration in the 1940s. We are going to talk with people who have made it their life's work to study it and to make sure we get it right. People who have been beyond generous with me and Mike Jarvitz and Kelsey Desiderio and Jen Mulraney Donovan as we have produced this labor of love burn order. And we are going to meet some local elected leaders tonight who are standing in the breach today and some of the activists who are helping them. And we're going to take questions from you guys. Very, very, very excited to get going tonight. Thank you so, so much for being here. Let's talk.

[Panelist/Activist]

Welcome back to Listen to youo Heart.

[Commercial Announcer]

I'm Jerry and I'm Jerry's Heart.

[Mayor Victor Gordo]

Today's topic, Repatha Evolocumab Heart. Why'd you pick this one?

[Rachel Maddow]

Well, Jerry, for people who have had.

[Panelist/Activist]

A heart attack like us, diet and.

[Rachel Maddow]

Exercise might not be enough to lower.

[Panelist/Activist]

The risk of another one.

[Mayor Victor Gordo]

Okay.

[Rachel Maddow]

To help know if we're at risk.

[Panelist/Activist]

We should be getting our ldlc, our bad cholesterol checked and talking to our doctor. I'm listening.

[Commercial Announcer]

And if it's still too high, Repatha.

[Panelist/Activist]

Can be added to a statin to lower our LDL C and our heart attack risk.

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

Hmm.

[Mayor Victor Gordo]

Guess it's time to ask about Repatha.

[Rachel Maddow]

Do not take Repatha if you are allergic to it. Serious allergic reactions can occur.

[Professor Laurie Binay]

Get medical help right away if you.

[Amy Oba]

Have trouble breathing or swallowing swelling of.

[Rachel Maddow]

The face, lips, tongue, throat or arms. Common side effects include runny nose, sore throat, common cold symptoms, flu or flu like symptoms, back pain, high blood sugar and redness pain or bruising at the.

[Mayor Victor Gordo]

Injection site, listen to your heart.

[Rachel Maddow]

Ask your doctor about Repatha. Learn [e-mail] or call 1-844-repatha.

[Commercial Announcer]

Looking for a new way to grow your business? With TikTok for business, anything is possible. If you've ever thought about advertising on TikTok, now's the time to do it. You can drive more customers to your website, sell products right in the app, and you can even use TikTok's creative tools to easily make content and find creators to help sell your products for you. Find new customers today. Just open your browser, type in getstarted.TikTok.com tiktokads and grow your business fast.

[Congressman Mark Takano]

Hey, Riley Herbst here with 23XI Racing, waiting for the bus, staring at traffic Crawl hard pass irev up Jumba Casino instead. Fast spins, blazing winds all fun.

[Rachel Maddow]

No downloads needed. Why let the clock drag when you.

[Congressman Mark Takano]

Can let the reels spin? Next stop jumbacasino.com let's Chumba.

[Rachel Maddow]

No purchase necessary. VGW Group voidware prohibited by law CTNC's 21/ sponsored by Jumba Casino it was a crime by the government.

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

They had no idea what was going to happen. My mother said in her diary, I wonder if today's the day they're going to line us up and shoot us.

[Rachel Maddow]

One of the most radical policies ever carried out in the United States.

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

When I started researching, I came across my own files and it gives my name. I think I'm three months and in the column about the status, I was an enemy alien.

[Rachel Maddow]

One of the most radical policies ever even tried in the United States.

[Panelist/Activist]

America had never incarcerated a mass body of its citizens before.

[Rachel Maddow]

For one key man inside the government, this was his crusade.

[Panelist/Activist]

Carl Ben Desen was absolutely the architect of the program of forced removal and imprisonment. He consistently believed the loyalty of Japanese Americans could never be determined.

[Rachel Maddow]

The US military deployed on the streets of America.

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

There was tremendous anxiety as they saw.

[Rachel Maddow]

Neighbors and friends being taken, whole communities targeted for removal.

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

Anybody with 1/16th Japanese blood was not likely but was a threat to national security. And that was a justification for taking these children and putting them into prison.

[Rachel Maddow]

A shambolic process.

[Panelist/Activist]

They're doing this on the fly, making things up as they go along.

[Rachel Maddow]

And when accountability finally came knocking, there was the burn order to cover it all up.

[Professor Laurie Binay]

Copies of the original report were ordered destroyed. They were burned. It was absolutely stunning that these documents existed. It was that classic smoking gun evidence that every lawyer wants to find.

[Rachel Maddow]

It was a stain on this country, one that we said we would never repeat.

[Professor Laurie Binay]

Many of us were Japanese Americans whose parents and grandparents had been incarcerated. And so for the opportunity for us to bring a case that would try and address the injustice of their incarceration was an opportunity of a lifetime.

[Rachel Maddow]

Please welcome Here tonight live, Dr. Satsuki Ina, Mr. Frank Abe, and Professor Laurie Binai. Such an honor to have all three of you here with us. Let me tell people who you are. They know you from Born Order, from your beautiful and distinctive voices. But Dr. Ina was born at the Tule Lake Prison Camp in California. She is a psychotherapist, a filmmaker. She's the author of an incredible book about her family history and her own journey of healing and activism. It's called the Poet and the Silk Girl. It's very good. You should read it. She's also the co founder of the social justice organization Tsuru for Solidarity, which has a starring role in episode six of the podcast. Frank Abe is a journalist and activist and writer and historian and filmmaker. Frank's father was incarcerated at heart Mountain. In 1978, Frank helped organize the first day of remembrance in Seattle, which was one of the key events helping kickstart the campaign for redress. Frank's graphic novel about the resistance to wartime incarceration is called We Hereby Refuse. If you have not read it yet, it will blow your mind. He's also the co editor of an indispensable anthology from Penguin called the Literature of Japanese American Incarceration. And he knows how to do this. Laurie Binay is with us. Professor Binai. Her family was incarcerated at the Santa Anita racetrack and then at Manzanar. As a brand new young baby lawyer, she was part of the legal team that overturned the conviction of fred Korematsu in 1983. Today she is professor emerita at Seattle University School of Law and she's the author of a brilliant biography of Fred Korematsu which is called Enduring Conviction. It is such a privilege to have all three of you here. I gotta say I'm very nervous to talk with you. I'm intimidated by all of your presence. Laurie, let me start with you. I want to ask you to contextualize a little bit the incarceration policy. Obviously it did not come out of nowhere. The policy arrived in the context of a long string of discriminatory laws. Can you talk a little bit about how that made the policy possible? What we should understand about that now?

[Professor Laurie Binay]

Absolutely. Any understanding of the wartime incarceration has to take place understanding the history of discrimination against Japanese Americans. Japanese Americans were denied the ability to become citizens. They were denied the ability to own the land that they worked. There were anti miscegenation laws preventing Japanese from intermarrying with whites. And some Japanese American kids went to segregated schools. So there's a whole history of exclusion and othering and being treated as foreign and dangerous. And so I kind of think about the removal of Japanese Americans from the United from the west coast as an ultimate exclusion after a history of exclusion in this country. And so it's against this backdrop that the bombing of Pearl harbor took place. And of course that's the match that kind of like activated all of the activists, anti Japanese activists. There were civic groups you mentioned in your podcast, the farmers, the, the farmers, agricultural organizations, politicians on every level of government, the media, all calling for the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. And so even though there might have been certainly some of the government officials identified in the podcast who actuated the program of incarceration, it was indeed a popular act where people had sought ways to get rid of Japanese Americans from the west coast for decades and decades. And this was the opportunity to make it Happen.

[Rachel Maddow]

And to that point, Frank, I was thinking about the Earl Warren arc of history. Earl Warren obviously ends up being a very different figure in popular imagination than he was in that moment leading up to the incarceration policy. And I think if you look at it as a political realist, I don't know what was in his heart, but certainly Earl Warren and the other politicians who got on this bandwagon, so many in Congress and in the United States Senate benefited politically from their vitriol and their lies about Japanese Americans. It was good politics, this incarceration policy. That sort of thing doesn't end when the policy ends. And that sort of thing still has its tail on by the time it gets to the point where you're trying to get redress for this movement. I was wondering, Frank, if you could just talk about how those politics, how the politics, the beneficial politics of racism for the racists have infected this all along.

[Panelist/Activist]

Well, Japanese Americans got out of the camps, and America still viewed our parents and grandparents as somewhat suspect. I mean, they must have done something wrong. Otherwise why were they put in these prison camps? And so my parents generation grew up with the idea that with people saying, still, it was you guys who bombed Pearl harbor after all. Remember Pearl Harbor? And so when we were growing up, it was a question of asking our parents, mom, dad, we just learned about this in school. How could you let this happen to you? Why did you go along? Why didn't you resist? And the answer was, the country was against us. And people at the time still believe that Japanese Americans were suspect. And at that time, we knew that we had to do something to change the narrative in this country, to turn the country around and to understand two things, that one, the camps were wrong, and two, that the government needed to do something tangible, to apologize and award a token compensation, not for our property losses and lost freedom, but for the violations of the Constitution of due process and equal protection under the law. And that was the kind of underlying part of Regis.

[Professor Laurie Binay]

We need to know.

[Rachel Maddow]

What happened so we don't do it again. So it's amazing how it really is repeating itself. Dr. Ina, you spoke really movingly for our interview in the podcast about how during mass incarceration, there wasn't public outcry. And I have heard a lot of white people respond to the podcast by really being stuck on that point and being filled with a lot of shame about that revelation. I think people thought once they knew that I was doing this podcast, there'd be some. There'd be more heroes, and there are Heroes, but there aren't a lot of heroes from that moment, and there aren't a lot of non Japanese American heroes who are standing up for their neighbors. We are today seeing activism and outcry about the Trump administration's targeting of immigrants and minority groups. I wonder how you assess it in terms of the difference and how meaningful that difference is, instrumentally and also emotionally.

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

Yeah, thank you for asking that question. One thing is clear is that as Japanese Americans, when we first heard news that children were being separated from their families, we realized that we are the people that we needed, that we had to show up as former child prisoners, unjustly incarcerated and separated from our families. So our work as part of our organization, Tsuru for Solidarity, was to activate Japanese Americans, help them make the connection about how this is so resonant, how it is a repetition of our history, and how important it is for us to stand together and speak out. And our secondary hope is that then you would see us standing up, many of us, 80s and 90s, bringing our wheelchairs, our canes, our hearing aids, Defying military officers when they ordered us to leave, standing in front of prison camps that had hundreds of children separated from their parents. And we said, not now, not again. Stop repeating history.

[Rachel Maddow]

Laurie. I think for some people listening to Burn Order, who are maybe thinking sort of hard about this history for the first time, the one name that they might have known about this story before spending this much time with it, maybe other than fdr, is Korematsu. And you, of course, worked on the legal team that overturned Mr. Korematsu's conviction. His conviction was vacated, which means his name was cleared for that conviction. The Supreme Court also said his case was wrongly decided. But you have written that the Korematsu case is still, in your words, a loaded weapon, that it is still legally dangerous, and it is still out there. Can you talk about that a little bit?

[Professor Laurie Binay]

So that's actually Justice Jackson, in dissent in Korematsu, said that Korematsu stands as a loaded weapon. Certainly foresaw the future here. So Korematsu has not been overruled. We were able to vacate Fred's conviction. We were able to prove that Japanese Americans, there was no military necessity. The court was lied to, as was shown on the podcast. But the Korematsu Supreme Court decision wasn't overruled itself. We won at the lower court. We didn't get back up before the Supreme Court. One of the most frightening things about Korematsu that still persists today is that the court during the Japanese American cases said that we have to defer to the government when the government's acting in the name of national security. In fact, in Hirabayashi, the court said when the government is called upon to exercises judgment and discretion by the war making branches of government, it's not for the court to sit in judgment of their decisions. And the court ultimately said we only have to ask whether there's some rational basis for this. And then in Korematsu, they adopted that very deferential standard and upheld the removal of Japanese Americans from the west coast on what we know now as a fraudulent reparation record. Right? So fast forward to Trump vs. Hawaii, where the court again said with regard to the Muslim ban, you know what, this is a matter of military, of national security. Even though we have statements from Trump saying anti Muslim statements, those don't really matter because on issues of national security, the court has to defer to the executive. And then still today, the government is asking the court to defer on issues of national security, which would be bad enough. We all know the separation of powers, the checks and balances, right? And so to have an area where the court's going to say we don't really have a role to act as a check is incredibly frightening. Now an even greater threat, because the whole phrase national security, the limits of it, are being pushed beyond belief. During World War II, military necessity, national security included picking up U.S. citizens on U.S. soil and rounding them up. We've also seen it rounding up people who are suspected of being the member of a gang and deporting them, restraining them, deporting them. We see masked ICE agents picking up people off the street in the name of national security. And we see our government firing on boats.

[Rachel Maddow]

It feels particularly ominous to me that we're talking once again about getting rid of birthright citizenship, about denaturalizing people. You're a naturalized citizen if you were born elsewhere, but you became a citizen while living here. Even beyond that, the administration, the President, has ranted sometimes about the idea of stripping American citizenship even from the homegrowns, right? Even from native born citizens. And the only reason you would want to do that is to be able to treat people in ways that you can't treat them if they are citizens.

[Panelist/Activist]

And Congress in World War II had been for decades have been trying to strip the Nisei and the Issei, our parents and grandparents, of their citizenship. The Nisei of the birthright citizenship, I should say, or to deport all the Japanese in America from the US and so one part of the story was the Tule Lake Segregation center where Satsuhi was born. And there the government, in 1944, Congress passed the Denaturalization act of 1944 to get Francis Biddle. The attorney general knew they couldn't strip American citizens of their birthright citizenship, the nusay. So they passed a bill to allow the Japanese in the camps to voluntarily renounce the U.S. citizenship. And 5,000 at Tule Lake took the bait and they walked right into the trap and spent the next 10 years struggling to get back the citizenship once they realized the gravity of their mistakes. So the effort In World War II, America tried to get Japanese Americans to self deport. And even now we're seeing the Trump administration trying to use the term self deportation, offering incentives for immigrants to, you know, just to leave on their own. It's a very frightening precedent.

[Rachel Maddow]

And is the pretext under which they are making the conditions in these black site camps so austere and terrible? They're saying, well, we want it to be miserable so that you will self deport.

[Panelist/Activist]

Yes.

[Professor Laurie Binay]

Our fathers and grandfathers were taken away, you know, from our families.

[Rachel Maddow]

So we know about family separation. We were imprisoned for almost four years. Dr. Ina, thinking about your group, Tsuru for solidarity. Tsuru means cranes, right? Solidarity means solidarity. If Americans were to have real solidarity in this moment with each other, with immigrants of all stripes, with the people who need it most, what would that look like? What would we be doing differently than what we're doing now?

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

Well, first of all, I think being here tonight is part of the resistance we need to build.

[Rachel Maddow]

No making your host cry. Not allowed.

[Professor Laurie Binay]

Not allowed.

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

You know, we need people to humanize the process that's happening now, this harm that is being perpetrated. And as a child born in a prison camp, my life has been tainted by the trauma that my parents suffered holding me in their arms. And we're damaging children every day while they're held in these prison camps. People are afraid that, like my mother felt that maybe today's the day they're going to line us up and shoot us. So we need to speak up. I think it doesn't have to be all the grand big national things. It is even the small actions that create solidarity, offering help in some ways, whether it's food or accompaniment to the courts, whether it's speaking up at demonstrations, it's being kind to each other. It means that there'll be a healing in our protest. I know that's been my experience that showing up and standing in front of these military officers that are threatening us that as we shout back, stop repeating history. We were surprised at something amazing happened for us. We were having a healing, finding the voice that we didn't have back when we were incarcerated. And.

[Rachel Maddow]

Frank, I think that a lot of people who are. Who've never tried to spend time with this history or don't have a personal connection to it, in particular, don't know about redress and don't know about the apology. Don't know about the restitution payments that were made. Don't know about the explicit promises from the US Government that this was wrong and we would not do it again. And part of the reason that we wanted to do this podcast and have it take this arc was to tell that story, to try to cement that history in people's minds, that this is something we said we wouldn't do again. And some of the people who said we wouldn't do it again are people who you like. I wonder how you think about the fact of redress and today's activism.

[Panelist/Activist]

Well, it's. At the time, 1978 to 1988 was a very short window to essentially, again turn the nation around on the question of the camps being wrong. President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act 1988. And we thought at the time, that job's done, we've done it. This will never happen again. And we've established that in American law, in the Constitution. So apparently America has a shorter memory span. And so then we said never again. And now we say never again is now. As simple as that.

[Rachel Maddow]

And this is to any of you, because you've all had different roles in different parts of this. And I'd ask you, feel free to avoid this question if you don't want to answer it or tell me your answer if you do. Should the people who were most personally responsible for conceiving, designing at implementing this policy be more famous for it? Would we benefit from a country for knowing more specifically and personally about not just the miasmic error that was created here, but the bad actions of specific government officials who pushed it through and made it happen?

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

Yeah, a great symbol of that is seeing these guards with their face covered, their stories hidden. You know, it evokes the executioner. People are terrified because they have dehumanized not only their victims, but themselves. So naming them, learning about them, and sharing and passing on that information is how we teach the next generation what happens to people when they lose their humanity.

[Professor Laurie Binay]

I want to add to something that Frank just said about we wanted Reparations. So that nothing like this could ever happen again. I think the problem is the definition of this is people have a very narrow view of what this is. So, like, maybe they're not going to round up 120, 25,000 Japanese Americans again. Check. We're not going to do that again. Right. And in fact, just as Robertson in the Trump ReHawaii decision said, Korematsu was wrong the day it was decided, you know, we shouldn't have rounded up 125,000 Japanese Americans. But that's not the it I think that we all care about. The it we all care about is really singling out a group of people as suspicious, as dangerous as criminals just because they're Mexican, because they're Japanese, because they're Chinese. It's the singling out of a group and demonizing them and demonizing them and scapegoating them. And I think that that's the problem is understanding we're not going to let it happen again.

[Rachel Maddow]

We want to hear from you guys in the audience who I know have some questions for our panel before. Before we do that, though, I'm gonna take a little bit of moment of privilege to recognize some of the really important people who are here in the audience tonight. And this is very humbling. Peter Irons is here.

[Mayor Victor Gordo]

Woo.

[Rachel Maddow]

You heard Peter's voice. In the podcast. Peter and Eiko Herzog Yoshinaga uncovered the documents that proved that the government lied about the origin of the incarceration policy. That led to the Corom Nobis strategy that Laurie was part of to overturn the convictions of Fred Korematsu and Gordon Hirabayashi and Minyasui. I also want to recognize Dale Minami is here. With Peter and Aiko's documents in hand. He led the legal team that successfully overturned the Korematsu conviction. I want to also tell you that Fred Korematsu's daughter is here. Karen Korematsu is here with us tonight. An honor to have you here, Karen. From the Manzanar Committee, the co chair, Bruce Embrey is here along with more than a dozen representatives from the Manzanar Committee. Thank you so much, Bruce, and the Manzanar Committee for being here. Thank you. Thank you. We have ambassadors here from the Japanese American National Museum who are here. Thank you so much for all of your work and for being here. We have representatives from Densho who are here. And everybody who's ever done any work in an archive right now knows that Densho are demigods in this area. They do the work of preserving the history of the incarceration policy and the people who lived it and the people who survived it and the people who fought it. And finally, with humility, I want to just take a moment to recognize the survivors and the family members of survivors of the prison camps who are with us here tonight. If you can stand or raise your hands. Excuse me. We are honored by your presence. We are honored by your presence. We are honored by your presence.

[Commercial Announcer]

Find new customers on a platform that's here to stay with TikTok for business, anything is possible. If you've ever thought about advertising your business on TikTok, now is the time to do it. You can drive more customers to your website, sell products right in the app, and you can even use TikTok's creative tools to easily make content and find creators to help sell your products for you. Find new customers today. Just open your browser, type in getstarted.TikTok.com tiktokads and grow your business fast.

[Congressman Mark Takano]

Hey, Riley Herbst here with 23XI Racing, waiting for the bus, staring at traffic crawl hard pass. I rev up Chumba Casino instead. Fast spins, blazing winds, all fun, no downloads needed.

[Rachel Maddow]

Why let the clock drag when you.

[Congressman Mark Takano]

Can let the reels spin? Next stop, chumbacasino.com let's Chumba.

[Rachel Maddow]

No purchase necessary. VGW Group voidware prohibited by law. CTC's 21+ sponsored by Jumba Casino DSW's.

[Audience Member]

Semiannual sale is back.

[Rachel Maddow]

Take 50% off all clearance shoes in stores for a limited time.

[Audience Member]

Literally every single clearance item at your.

[Rachel Maddow]

Designer shoe warehouse store is on sale right now.

[Audience Member]

Sneakers, boots, dress shoes.

[Rachel Maddow]

If they're on the clearance racks, they're 50% off.

[Audience Member]

So what are you waiting for?

[Rachel Maddow]

Don't sleep on these savings. Get to DSW asap. It's haul or nothing, people.

[Audience Member]

Shop the DSW semi annual sale today.

[Rachel Maddow]

In this instance, we are learning from the past, what not to do in the future. So I think the people are standing up where we didn't do this in the 40s.

[Panelist/Activist]

Hello.

[Rachel Maddow]

Hello.

[Audience Member]

My name is Amber Tayas and I am from Monrovia, California.

[Rachel Maddow]

God bless you.

[Audience Member]

I am a history teacher in Los Angeles Unified School District, Eagle Rock High School. I just want to thank all of you on stage for all of the work that you're doing. Many of my students and their families are affected by these this president's policies on immigration. So thank you for all of your hard work. And one of my goals within my classroom is to bring historical perspectives from traditionally marginalized groups throughout history into mainstream history lessons. I use language very intensive intentionally in my classroom. Last year I read Sharon McMahon's book that included a profile on Norman Mineta and Daniel Inouye, and she used terms like incarceration and imprisonment camps in lieu of the term internment camps. I noticed in this podcast that you did the same. Rachel, how important is it to use language like that? And do you think at some point the history books will change the. To use a more accurate description of those camps?

[Rachel Maddow]

Great question. A great question and beautifully put. Would any of you like to answer that?

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

So much of the government's effort to hide and distort what they did to us started with the language, the euphemistic language used to minimize the.

[Rachel Maddow]

The.

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

Trauma, the ways in which they protected themselves by using words like relocation. And I know for myself, when I was writing my own book, I caught myself because I had internalized what the government had said about what happened to us and then realized that we weren't just removed from our homes, we weren't just placed in horse stalls. We were arrested and we were imprisoned. We were behind barbed wire fences and how important it is for students to learn the truth about our experience and the gravity of the distortion of reality that our government led.

[Panelist/Activist]

If Roger Daniels were here, Professor Roger Daniels, he would point out that internment is a legal term that applies only to the arrest and imprisonment of enemy aliens or aliens on a citizenship. So internment was a term we kind of progressed to in the 70s and 80s when the term back then implied society was relocation camp. So it was a struggle just to say internment camp. And now we're getting more to proper terminology and calling them incarceration camps.

[Professor Laurie Binay]

So I was going to say the same thing, that internment applies to the imprisonment of citizens of another country with which we're at war. And so using it in terms of the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans is improper, but it's proper with regard to the roundup right after Pearl harbor of our grandparents, of the immigrants would be properly called internment. And then Executive Order 9066, we call it incarceration. So it's technical, but it's also respecting the ability of the people to name their own experiences. Yes, I think.

[Rachel Maddow]

Yeah. I've always felt like as we. One of the signs of growing up is becoming intolerant of euphemism. Yeah.

[Amy Oba]

Hi, I am Mary Lee Nambu.

[Rachel Maddow]

This is my husband, Rich Nambu, and we are from Glendora, California, and he's Sanse.

[Amy Oba]

My question is for Dr. Ina.

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

I'm a licensed clinician.

[Amy Oba]

I'm here with Rich, my husband, whose parents were both incarcerated. In your work as a psychotherapist, have you discovered clusters of.

[Rachel Maddow]

Of symptoms common in the multi generational.

[Amy Oba]

Transmission process unique to internment camp survivors?

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

Children.

[Rachel Maddow]

Yes.

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

You know, many times people who are starting to express and identify with the trauma that they suffered. They talk about how their parents didn't talk about the camps and somehow assume that because the parents didn't talk about it, not only did it not affect them, but that it wasn't so bad. So part of the goal of therapy is to help the person identify what. What is motivating their parents to be so silent. So much anxiety and depression became evident to me as I worked with families who said the teenager who was getting into trouble wasn't getting straight A's like all Japanese Americans should, that there was something wrong with him.

[Rachel Maddow]

But.

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

I often explain that trauma has a way of getting communicated mostly non verbally. So my parents lived in great fear after their release because they were afraid that anything that we might do could put us back in prison again. So much unpredictability because they never committed a crime that justified what happened to them. So the transmission of trauma is really evident in the need to succeed and the threat and danger if you don't. So my parents communicated to me on a regular basis, if you get a B, if you get in trouble, the teacher scolds you. If you get a parking ticket, that drastic, horrible things are going to happen in your life. And so the need to achieve. Many of the young people that I treated in my practice were young people who were so stressed from the amount of pressure they felt from their parents because it was a dangerous world for my parents. And our need to success was how we were going to save our parents from that kind of anxiety. So I could do a whole nother book on it, but I hope that answers your question.

[Rachel Maddow]

Thank you.

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

Hi there. My name is Angel Slamokoski and I'm from Valencia. And it's a humbling experience to be.

[Professor Laurie Binay]

Here with all of you people.

[Audience Member]

Thank you. And thank you, Peter, for being here.

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

My question is Bern Order shows that authoritarianism rarely arrives with tanks.

[Rachel Maddow]

It creeps in through paperwork, quiet compliance.

[Professor Laurie Binay]

And people who don't want to get involved.

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

Today. What form of societal silence do you.

[Rachel Maddow]

See as most dangerous and how can.

[Professor Laurie Binay]

We as citizens actively disrupt it before it's too late?

[Panelist/Activist]

I'm not going to offer any particular remedy aside from we talked about, you know, talk to your neighbors, be visible, get in the way don't obey in advance, as Timothy Snyder said. But I think that the quote that I want to pass on is from Pulitzer Prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen of usc. If you want to know what you would have done when Japanese Americans were forcibly removed and incarcerated In World War II, now you know, it's what you're doing now.

[Rachel Maddow]

I would just add, and I'm no expert on these things, I would say that in the news business, one thing that I have noticed that I think is really corrosive is when the administration puts out statements about people who it has been caught radically mistreating or flagrantly mistreating or mistreating in such a way that it has attracted empathy or attention from other people. They will also always find some way to release some sort of derogatory information about the person who was targeted. And you will see in the news business a retraction of interest. And it may not be a removal of interest, but you will see it get sort of knocked down a peg in terms of how it's going to be covered. Oh, this person had a conviction. Oh, this person had a removal order. Oh, this person had any number of things that are completely incommensurate with the treatment that they received that got all of our attention in the first place. There are no perfect victims. There are no perfect victims. And your perfection should not define whether or not we see you as a victim. And that, That is. It makes me itch, makes me itch at work. Professor Bernay, did you want to talk about that at all? Weigh in on that last question.

[Professor Laurie Binay]

I do have to say I'm really heartened by the number of people who are standing up now who stood up after the treatment of Muslims and persons of Middle eastern descent after 9, 11. I mean, I'm heartened by that. I think all that happened. I'm sure you all felt the same way, felt like people are standing up in ways that people didn't stand up after the incarceration. And the lawyers on the front line today just blow my mind that they're doing the really hard work that they're doing. But I also totally agree with the sentiment that we all can do something, all need to do something, that during the incarceration vast majority just let it happen and we just can't do that. And so the no Kings rally show, showing up, protesting, writing letters to the editor, having speakers come up. I talk about the Japanese American incarceration a lot because I think a lot of people in this country get that that was wrong. Yes, Some people think it didn't happen. They're deniers or whatever. But I think a lot of people get that it's wrong. And so if you can start talking about the Japanese American incarceration and then push the envelope a little bit and talk about ignorance and fear and all of that, people think then can get how what's happening with immigrants today. So I think talking about the Japanese American incarceration is a powerful way of kind of raising consciousness, and I think all three of us agree with that. To your civic organizations, your church groups, to your Kiwanis clubs, to your, like, whatever, buy books for elementary schools, all of that. I think there's so many things we can do as individuals.

[Rachel Maddow]

It starts a moral conversation immediately goes right to people's hearts. Lori Benay, Frank Abe, Satsuki, Ina, I could not have done any of the work that we did without not just the interviews that we did with you, but also the guidance from you. Thank you, especially for telling us when we were going wrong. Thank you for being here today. You're real American heroes and I am honored to be with you here tonight.

[Professor Laurie Binay]

So thank you.

[Rachel Maddow]

Thank you.

[Panelist/Activist]

Thank you so much.

[Rachel Maddow]

Thank you. Thank you.

[Panelist/Activist]

Good job.

[Rachel Maddow]

Thank you. Thanks. Thank you.

[Professor Laurie Binay]

Thank you.

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

Thank you.

[Rachel Maddow]

Thank you. We've been talking a lot already tonight about parallels between what happened 80 years ago and in our own time. What is different now? As we, as we mentioned, Dr. Ina, in her interview with us for the podcast, she was very blunt about the fact that there really were not street protests. There were no. There was one magazine article that came out in the New Republic months after people had already been in the camps. There was one politician who we covered, Colorado Governor Ralph Carr, who we highlight in the series. There were the Quakers, the Quaker activists who advocated against it and who also tried to provide companies and tried to do things that would mitigate the harm that was being caused to these communities. But when I think about the leadership and the lack of protest, what we saw, the absence of protest, the absence of street resistance from non Japanese Americans who saw what was happening to their neighbors, the absence of courage among elected officials at every level, that is very important for us to understand about how wrong Japanese American incarceration was and how it was able to happen. But it is not exactly the circumstance in which we find ourselves today. Right. We do now have just talk about elected leaders. We have some elected leaders who are willing to take a stand. And when we see them taking a stand, their motivations are patriotic, they are personal, sometimes they are political. But we welcome it all together, we're sending a message to Donald Trump, to.

[Mayor Victor Gordo]

Christy Noem, to Gregory Bevino and anyone else seeking to terrorize our people. Your divisiveness and your brutality are not welcome here.

[Rachel Maddow]

We're at the Democracy center in Little Tokyo, the sacred site where we were interning and bussing the Japanese, that shameful part of our past. And what did the administration do? What did Stephen Miller do? What did Donald Trump do? They sent masked men. Immigrants have rights and we have the right to stand up and push back. You cannot stop people just because they are brown. Not in this city, not in this country. It's not normal. It's not anywhere close to being normal. And it's rightfully shocked the conscience of all of us. This is an attack on every person in this city and in every city in our country.

[Panelist/Activist]

So hear me, President Trump, when I say this.

[Rachel Maddow]

To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us. This is a racist, bigoted attack on.

[Amy Oba]

Brown skinned people who have an accent.

[Rachel Maddow]

It has nothing to do about safety.

[Amy Oba]

It has nothing to do about keeping Charlotte.

[Mayor Victor Gordo]

Say, I'm a former immigrant, I'm mayor of this city. And you know, the stigmatization of one people in our sec, in our community throughout the country of Latinos and people of Latino descent is just wrong.

[Congressman Mark Takano]

I think it is shameful that this administration makes citizens feel like they have to carry a passport in their own country. No citizen should have to carry a passport in their own country to prove that they're American.

[Rachel Maddow]

I'd like to introduce you to a couple of the people who you just saw there. Pasadena's Mayor Victor Gordo. Thank you for being here, Mr. Mayor. California Congressman Mark Takano and activist Amy Oba of Nikkei Progressives, who you heard me talk about earlier tonight here in la. All right, let me give you a little more introduction for each of them. Congressman Takano's parents and grandparents were all sent to incarceration camps during World War II after they returned home to Riverside County. Mark Takano grew up there. He has now represented that district in Congress. We are honored to have you here. Pasadena's Mayor Victor Gordo moved to Pasadena from Mexico with his parents when he was a kid. If you watched the show on Ms. Now called the Rachel Maddow show, you will recognize him as one of the first public officials we interviewed on the show this year about fighting back against federal agents, including suing ICE to stop their tactics in this city. And specifically, you may also, I also remember the story of Mayor Gordo Signing himself up on the spot spontaneously to name himself the lawyer, the personal attorney for one man who had been taken by ice, whose wife had brought his medication. She was trying to get his medication to him. He met her at the doors of the ICE facility where they would not let her in and they would not take the medication. He, on the spot, became that man's attorney to try to get into that facility to get him his medication. We are also joined, as I mentioned earlier, by Amy Oba with Nikkei Progressives. She is a community leader. That organization is based in Little Tokyo and Amy's grandparents were incarcerated at Heart Mountain during World War II. She's now an organizer in a rapid response network to help protect your community from the ICE raids in la. So it's fantastic to have all of you here. Amy, let me start with you just to ask you a little bit about what you do, the nuts and bolts. What are you guys doing on a day to day, week to week basis?

[Amy Oba]

Yeah, so it's quite simple. There's just a group of us that regularly drive around our community. We're looking for ICE activity. We started organizing when Trump invoked the Alien Enemies act earlier this year. We got together as many community orgs as we could. It helps that Nikkei Progressives has a lot of people who have been organizing in the Japanese American community for decades. And we wanted to know what we could do to help. So we started with Know youw Rights trainings and red card distribution. We also formed a rapid response network under Chirla. And a little bit later we adopted safety and peace patrols to. When we learned about them from the harbor area peace patrols. We worked together with them to draw attention to the fact, like you mentioned earlier, the ICE was staging out of Terminal island, which was a former Japanese American community. And when we saw what they were doing, we implemented that as well. And what we. Yes, it's.

[Rachel Maddow]

Can you explain a little bit about how the peace patrols work, about how that, how that happens, how that works?

[Amy Oba]

Yeah, yeah. We're just driving around in cars. We're keeping an eye out for ice. And when ICE is in the community, we're letting everybody know. Luckily, we're very connected. We can spread the word quickly and we want to get on the ground to document and to just alert our community. And it really does matter because when people are arrested by ice, they really, it is like they're kidnapped. They really can just disappear for days, for weeks. ICE won't have them in their system. Sometimes, like we know of a family right now, it's been eight weeks, and the family have started to believe that their family member's dead because ICE will not provide any information on where they are, what's happened to them. And so even just getting a name so that the family can know and that immigration lawyers can know where to look for people is really helpful.

[Rachel Maddow]

Do you need support, more support from the community than you're getting?

[Amy Oba]

We would love more support from the community.

[Rachel Maddow]

Congressman Takano, is there continuity between, and this is sort of carrying on from the earlier discussion we had continuity between what Congress did in the 1980s, right? The. The investigation, the apology, the restitution payments, the pledge, the bipartisan, unified, unanimous pledge that we would never do this again. It feels like there's utter discontinuity between that era in Congress, which was the Reagan era when that happened, and now is there a way that Congress can reconnect to that moral clarity of that model?

[Congressman Mark Takano]

Well, we are in a muddy moment. More than muddy. We've seen the same kind of lies being told about Latinos and other immigrants, fear being whipped up, national security being invoked as the premise for why people's civil liberties can be violated. There is a difference, though. I do think there are more people who know the history, not enough people who know the history of Japanese American internment. I was heartened in the first Trump administration to hear Laura Bush, the wife of George W. Bush, say what? You know, the separation policy. This reminds me of what happened to Japanese Americans. So it was a prominent Republican figure. It wasn't enough, but it told me that it had not completely disappeared.

[Rachel Maddow]

You.

[Congressman Mark Takano]

Know, more recently at the memorial of Norm Mineta, George Bush showed up at the eulogy and talked about how important it was to have Norm Mineta in the cabinet during 9 11. And Norm spoke up and said, Mr. President, we cannot repeat what happened to Japanese Americans and my people. So it is important that we review this history. I am disappointed that we have a Supreme Court that is highly deferential to executive power. I want to put a we can hope we can win, that these cases win their way through the courts and that they. That they finally overturned Korematsu. But more immediately, we can build a national support for a bill that I introduced along with my Japanese American colleagues in February as Trump took office, the Korematsu Takai Civil Liberties Act. What the bill does is it prohibits detention or imprisonment based on someone's race, nationality, or any other perceived characteristic. It seems incredible to me. It seems incredible to me that we haven't done this and that that's not the standard of our courts, but we saw Justice Kavanaugh beyond belief, give license to ICE and everybody else to do racial profiling, which is the connection of the present moment to what happened during World War II. People being denied their liberty based on who they are. And this is not America.

[Rachel Maddow]

Mayor Gordo, there's fighting back to try to stop what's happening and the type of shield, the type of legal shield that Congressman Takano is talking about, but there's also just helping people who are being hurt. And I wanted to ask, how do you think about just mutual aid, just helping communities that right now, in many places are in hiding, that are bearing the brunt of what Trump is doing and how that is changing life in Pasadena right now?

[Mayor Victor Gordo]

You know, it really is. You know, and I've experienced living in that fear. As you mentioned, I was born in Zacatecas, Mexico. My parents brought me to. My parents brought me to passing at age 5. And I remember being brought across the border. And, you know, my parents, my grandparents brought me to the border where I was then brought across to reunite with my parents, who had moved here three years before. And we lived in a garage. My father was a cook and dishwasher at the same fashion restaurant for 50 years. My mother was a seamstress. And we lived in a garage. And in that garage, I probably should have brought it, we had a coffee can. Remember the Folgers coffee cans, the big ones, the gallon size. And in that coffee can was cash, copies of birth certificates, driver's licenses, and a handwritten list of phone numbers. And I knew from age 5 that if my parents did not come home, that I was to take that coffee can and knock on the neighbor's door and ask for help. And it pains me today to see kids. You know, the earlier panelists talked about the impact to kids and kids being harmed. And that's very true. I see it in the kids that I go visit at schools. I see it in the kids and their parents when I see them at the grocery store. It's had a tremendous emotional impact on Pasadena, and it's had a tremendous economic impact on Pasadena as well. And it's no way for anyone to live, not in Pasadena, not in this state of California or this country or the world. No one should live in fear.

[Rachel Maddow]

And alleviating that fear is not necessarily a government project. It's a neighborly project, in many cases, a pastoral project.

[Congressman Mark Takano]

Yeah.

[Mayor Victor Gordo]

It's people to people.

[Rachel Maddow]

Yeah. Amy, your grandparents were incarcerated during World War II. Does that family history inform the way that you think about this work now.

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

It does.

[Amy Oba]

It does. And I also think my community's history informs the way that I worked as well. So when Japanese Americans were fighting for redress, they weren't fighting alone. We actually had Representative Dimely from the Congressional Black Caucus approach our. Our community and offer the Congressional Black Caucus's support through Congress for the bills. He even went as far as to open up his offices in D.C. and let a giant delegation of Japanese Americans who are trying to lobby for these bills pass. He let them use his offices as their headquarters, and that is the kind of support that we need, and that was instrumental in getting those bills passed for us. And so I feel like the Japanese American community has an obligation to stand in solidarity with other communities. And it's something we have done. We've been part of the Civil Rights Movement, the United Farm Workers movement, some of the Nikkei Progressive members were part of the Black Panthers.

[Professor Laurie Binay]

And.

[Amy Oba]

Yeah, and it's what. It's what drives our solidarity. Now. We believe that the Latino community right now is where the Japanese American community was 80 years ago, and it's our turn to be in solidarity.

[Mayor Victor Gordo]

But.

[Amy Oba]

But I also. Sorry, I also. I also wanted to say a little bit that my own family history also drives my work. So my grandparents were both at Heart Mountain, Wyoming. That's where they met. They were young lovers. But my grandfather. And there is a little bit of family history discrepancy with this, but my father remembers hearing that my grandfather was a no. No boy. And for those of you who don't know, Japanese Americans were given a loyalty questionnaire when they entered the camp. And people who said, no, I will not swear loyalty to the US Government and no, I will not serve in the US Military. We're called no no Boys. And often they were separated from their families and interned in a separate prison camp. But my grandfather and. Well, I want to say, too, that for Japanese Americans to serve in the US Military when their families were in concentration camps at home, that took a certain type of courage and sacrifice. But, yes, but I also think it takes a certain type of. Of courage, like my grandfather, to say no. Like, For him, it was no. The way I'm being treated is not okay. The way my family and community is being treated right now is not okay. And I want. I think that's something that we need right now in this moment, for more people to say no. The way that immigrant communities are being treated right now is not okay. And I'm going to do something about it.

[Rachel Maddow]

There has been A lot of hand wringing over the perception that the protest movement against Trump tends to skew older, that older Americans are leading the resistance while younger people are less involved. I want to say that the person who said, whoop, I'm with you. I don't think of it as a bad thing if the resistance movement is being led by the cotton tops. I really don't. I feel like you don't mess with American, America's seniors. And I have no problems and no reservations about this at all. But I wanted to ask Mayor Gordo about the nature of the pushback that you were describing in the streets. And then, Amy, afterwards, if you would talk a little bit about whether you feel like young people are engaged in the fight or how you feel about that multi generational element.

[Mayor Victor Gordo]

Well, in Pasadena, we did have student groups who led protests. In fact, the initial protest that I attended was one put together by students at John Muir High School in Pasadena.

[Rachel Maddow]

Wow.

[Mayor Victor Gordo]

And, you know, they not only took to the streets themselves to protest, but then they organized their peers and they helped to organize in large part the large demonstrations. And that's what it's going to take. It's going to take people exercising their voice in all age groups. And then the congressman talks about the importance of all levels of government being involved. Pasadena immediately took a step to denounce officially the actions of the Trump administration at ice. And I believe, and I invite other communities, other cities and governmental entities, including school boards, to do the same thing.

[Professor Laurie Binay]

And.

[Mayor Victor Gordo]

That'S the type of partnership and the battle that we need to put up on all fronts.

[Rachel Maddow]

Amy?

[Amy Oba]

Yeah, I mean, I would say that a lot of people in UK progressives are my age and younger, so it's really fun to work in an intergenerational organization. Like, I have a really good time, but I actually do think the younger folks are pretty involved. I'm thinking about the.

[Rachel Maddow]

Yep.

[Amy Oba]

I'm thinking about the Palestinian encampments that went up all across the nation at college campuses. Students, students were incredibly organized and incredibly committed. And I think it's actually on our political leaders to take the concerns of this generation seriously. Very few people, very few, even Democrats, have been willing to speak out against the genocide happening in Gaza. And I think the younger generation has taken note and that political leaders need to work harder to incorporate the concerns of this generation.

[Rachel Maddow]

Thank you.

[Congressman Mark Takano]

Can I just say something about this? So my 70 something aunt and uncle showed up at the protests. They were among the older generation. But, you know, I think there's something else going on here. Rachel, I sit on the Higher Ed subcommittee of the Educational Workforce Committee, and we've had these fraudulent hearings all year about weaponizing dissent or antisemitism on. There is anti. Semitism. I don't want to deny that there's anti Semitism, but there's a weaponization also, in a way that quells dissent on university campuses. And so part of what I think is going on among young people, especially in areas of the country where there should be vigorous dissent and vigorous pushback, is they've watched their peers being suspended from university. They've watched them being arrested, arrested, deported because of things they've written. We have to stand up for. We can reject antisemitism, but stand up for. Look in this book, Stand up for Institutions. Universities are these islands of democratic institutions. We have to protect them. Young people. That's where they are.

[Rachel Maddow]

The podcast is fantastic. I feel like I'm there with them. I think all of the people that they bring in are wonderful, and I love it. I believe we have some questions from the audience. Is that correct? Yes, it is. Look, the lights came up in just the right way. There's a human there.

[Audience Member]

Yes, just enough so I could read my card. My name is Margaret Gabriel. I'm from Aliso Viejo, California.

[Rachel Maddow]

Thank you.

[Audience Member]

I really. Orange County. So I drove up.

[Amy Oba]

Really.

[Audience Member]

First, I want to say really appreciate the MSNOW Live team for coming to the West Coast. We are very excited to see that.

[Professor Laurie Binay]

Yeah.

[Audience Member]

My question is that is for Rachel. In episode two, you highlight Carl Ben Debson as being in a fortuitous position to implement his plan since the man in charge, his boss, was a buffoon. Key word. As I listened, I swore I sensed a teeny bit of insinuation to two individuals in the current administration. Now, be honest. Were you thinking of them when you wrote those words?

[Rachel Maddow]

I can't quite hear you. We'll just have to move on to the next question. There is a. Yeah, that's not just an archetype. That was. That is a. I think there is a pretty direct analogy there. Listen, I mean, I think it's a really interesting political and indeed moral question. When we talked about this a little bit earlier tonight, the idea of infamy, if you do something terrible, should you be forgotten or should you be famous? And there's an argument for both of them. And I think that the fact that General John DeWitt has sort of, if anybody has taken the fall in history for Japanese American incarceration is. General John DeWitt is deserved. He deserves it. But I do think that the guy who was the brains of the operation is named Carl Bendetzen. But I'm esp, communicating to you who I'm thinking of in this moment. And it's a pattern that we can see when you've got a guy who in charge, who's willing to take the heat and indeed sort of enjoys it and likes his relationship with the press and likes to say things that aren't true, that get attention and is happy to be seen as racist and happy to be seen as transgressive, and that's part of how he acts in the world. That's a great person to hide behind to effectuate something that is truly nefarious, that comes from the same racist place, but that actually needs a brain to run it. And so Carl Ben Datsun ought to be famous. And I think that to the extent that the Donald Trumps of the world are going to be retaining their evidence for their accountability in the future, so should the people who work for them. As Deputy White House Chief of Staff, Hypothetically speaking.

[Congressman Mark Takano]

It's funny, there's two letters, S and M.

[Rachel Maddow]

We should talk about that later.

[Amy Oba]

My name is Noel and I'm from Los Angeles.

[Rachel Maddow]

Given the obvious similarities between ICE raids.

[Amy Oba]

And detention and what happened to Japanese Americans after World War II, what would your panel suggest we average Americans do to pressure elected officials to course correct.

[Rachel Maddow]

And will it be enough?

[Amy Oba]

It must be horrible to watch history repeat itself in the darkest ways. Why does America keep repeating this ugly.

[Dr. Satsuki Ina]

Cycle of inhumane treatment of immigrants?

[Rachel Maddow]

Amy, do you feel like you want to talk to that one?

[Amy Oba]

I can take a stab at it. So I don't know about pressure. I mean, I think there's a lot of ways to talk to our elected officials, to work with our elected officials, to get protective policies in place. Even just right now, asking that our current county like police departments not share information with ICE and Border Patrol in our midst like that, that can be really helpful. But I also think everyday people can just get out there and do things. So are you dropping your kids off at school? Do you know that other people who are undocumented might be dropping their kids off and could use the support of a community looking out for ICE while that's happening, it doesn't have to be these crazy heroic things. It's okay to just think about what you could do every week just with a little bit of your time and to do it. Can you call? We have a lot of people who spend time calling detention centers to see when people's visitation slots are for families because they can be on hold for hours. It can take a long time. So even just using your time a little bit or donating to orgs if you don't have a lot of time, but something you can do consistently, something that you can continue to do yourself, it becomes unstoppable when enough people do that together.

[Rachel Maddow]

You know.

[Mayor Victor Gordo]

I would, yes, some elected officials absolutely need to be pressured and they should be. But people also need to be supported who are making the correct decision. And you know, I appreciate Amy's comments because, you know, we're really talking about, you know, they're, there's the moderate people in the middle that we need to convince to come to the correct side. And we're going to do that by educating them, by writing op ed pieces, by communicating with them directly. We all have people in our lives that we know are teeter tottering and maybe even in our own families and because we married into them. So I think continuing that discourse, let's not make the same mistake that the other side made by demonizing people who maybe have a different opinion that we can persuade, that we can bring to us. Some people will never persuade, but I firmly believe that the correct approach is to try and bring people over who are right thinking people.

[Rachel Maddow]

I mean, the lessons of history more than anything boil down to act in ways that you are proud of now and that your family will be proud of you for, for generations.

[Mayor Victor Gordo]

That's right.

[Rachel Maddow]

And that's part of what we're trying to learn that's going to do it for us tonight. Thank you all so much for being here. Congressman Mark Tatiano, Mayor Gordo, thank you so much. Thank you, Mayor Nike, Mayor Amy, thank you so much. Thank you to everybody who helped make this happen. Thank you to Mike Jarvitz, Kelsey Desideria, Jen Mul, Rainey Donovan and everybody at msnow who made this podcast possible. Thank you to all our interviewees. Los Angeles, you've been amazing. Good night. Tyler reddick here from 2311 Racing. And Bubba Wallace. You know what's the worst part of a race?

[Commercial Announcer]

A rain delay. Sitting around waiting for the track to dry is dull. But instead of waiting, we hang out with Champa. Casino, social casino, slots, bingo, solitaire. Plenty of fun to keep us entertained.

[Rachel Maddow]

So why let a rain delay slow you down?

[Commercial Announcer]

Play [e-mail] let's Chumba.

[Rachel Maddow]

No purchase necessary VGW Group void.

[Mayor Victor Gordo]

We're prohibited by law.

[Rachel Maddow]

CTNC's 21+ sponsored by Chumba Casino.