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Arkansas News: Possible migrant site minutes from former internment camp

LITTLE ROCK, AR – Nearly 75 years after federal officials shuttered a Japanese-American internment camp in Rohwer, Arkansas, the Trump administration is examining a site about 2 miles away as a potential temporary shelter for immigrant children.

The Department of Health and Human Services said Thursday that the government is considering an unused Department of Agriculture property in nearby Kelso as an immigrant shelter, as well as a possible shelter at Little Rock Air Force Base.

Actor George Takei, who lived at Rohwer, tweeted about the proposed shelter late Thursday, saying he had “no words.”  Between 1942 and 1945, the internment camp housed around 8,500 Japanese-American citizens under armed guard.

Many of the state’s Republican officials, including U.S. Sens. Tom Cotton and John Boozman as well as Gov. Asa Hutchinson, are opposed to either possible shelter in Arkansas.

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This story has been corrected to show that the community is named Rohwer, not Rowher.

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George Takei on Life Inside a Japanese Internment Camp During WWII

democracynow

Published on Feb 27, 2014

http://www.democracynow.org - Legendary actor, author and activist, George Takei, best known for playing Hikaru Sulu on Star Trek, appears on Democracy Now! for an extended interview. In this excerpt, he talks about his role as World War II veteran Sam Kimura in “Allegiance: A New…

The most moving of the sites is the cemetery. As a child, I never went there, yet that is the only thing that still stands from Rohwer Camp, except for a lone smokestack where the infirmary once operated. The memorial marker is a tall, crumbling concrete obelisk, in tribute to the young men who went from their barbed wire confinement to fight for America, perishing on bloody European battlefields. That day, I stood solemnly with surviving veterans who had served in the segregated all-Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated unit in all the war.

We ended the ceremony with a release of butterflies. They symbolized beauty confined, first in cocoons, then in a box, but now released, free to go and be wherever they chose.

As I write this, once again the national dialogue turns to defining our enemies, the impulse to smear whole communities or people with the actions of others still too familiar and raw. Places like the museum and Rohwer camp exist to remind us of the dangers and fallibility of our democracy, which is only as strong as the adherence to our constitutional principles renders it. People like myself and those veterans lived through that failure, and we understand how quickly cherished liberties and freedom may slip away or disappear utterly.

Places like Rohwer matter, more than seventy years later. And so, we remember.