Ask the Biden-Harris Administration to stop repeating history.
Freedom, opportunity, and dignity should be at the core of our immigration system.
But our current system isn’t set up to uphold these values. Instead, people are deprived of their liberty, separated from their loved ones, and excluded from their communities by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Meet Survivors of Detention
On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt issued executive order 9066, uprooting 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from their homes and businesses and incarcerating them for years in American Concentration Camps.
This video series highlights the connections between Japanese American incarceration survivors and current survivors of detention centers and features an intergenerational cross-racial dialogue of survivors of state-sanctioned violence.
We must learn from this cruel and horrifying time in U.S. history and put an end to detention and surveillance. There are currently over 200,000 immigrants under electronic surveillance. This expansion represents a new erosion of civil liberties in the U.S. It was wrong in the 1940s, and should not happen today.
For decades, detention and deportation have devastated families, disproportionately harming Black and Brown immigrant communities. The dysfunction and brutality of the immigration enforcement system was heightened under the last Administration. Dismantling it must be a central priority for the Biden Administration.
Detention and deportation devastates families and communities, and it costs billions annually in taxpayer dollars. To undo the cruelty of the last Administration and build a more humane, fair system, the Biden Administration must take immediate steps to dismantle the abusive immigration enforcement machinery and build an immigration system that respects all people, regardless of race, religion, or birthplace, including a path to citizenship. It must also exercise its executive authority and:
- End the detention of immigrants and people seeking asylum. The Biden Administration must shut down immigration detention facilities, end contracts with private prison companies and local governments, and release people from detention.
- End deportations that harm families, workers, and communities. Deportation traumatizes children, chills workers’ rights, and undermines civic participation. It disproportionately harms Black and brown communities. The Biden Administration must protect immigrant families, workers, and communities and center racial justice in immigration.
- End the police-to-deportation pipeline. For too long, ICE has relied on local and state police to conduct immigration enforcement, and imported the racial disparities and structural racism of the criminal system into immigration. The entanglement between the police and ICE through programs like 287g and Secure Communities must end.
Ask the Biden-Harris Administration to end U.S. policies of detention and create a humane and just immigration system.
Meet the Film Producer
Claudia Katayanagi is a documentary filmmaker and an alumni of UC Berkeley. As a Yonsei, a fourth generation Japanese American, and a descendant of American concentration camps during World War II, her work explores the complex, and cumulative effects of multiple forms of discrimination, such as racism, sexism and the American immigration policy and how these issues persist today.
Her debut feature documentary, A Bitter Legacy, explores the history of the imprisonment of over 122,000 people of Japanese ancestry during WWII with a focus on the lesser-known, almost secret prisons for those who spoke up about the unlawfulness of these prisons, and were then labeled troublemakers and sent to “Citizen Isolation Centers” in Arizona, Utah and California. These camps are now considered to be precursors to the contentious U.S. military prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A Bitter Legacy is an award winning documentary, and not only has played in film festivals worldwide, but has a distributor, Gravitas Ventures and is now available on 8 different streaming platforms and is available on DVD and Blu-Ray at the Japanese American National Museum, in LA and at the National Japanese American Historical Society in San Francisco.
One of the first women, not to mention Asian American women to be in the IATSE Filmmakers Union, Claudia is an accomplished activist, trailblazer for minority women’s rights, and industry veteran of more than 30 years. Go to abitterlegacy.com for more information about this film, and to her Vimeo and YouTube channels for several other projects.
