The JACL Denounces President Trump’s Executive Order Expanding Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp

January 31, 2025

For Immediate Release

Seia Watanabe, VP Public Affairs, swatanabe@jacl.org

Matthew Weisbly, Education Programs/Comms Manager, mweisbly@jacl.org

The JACL denounces President Trump’s Executive Order expanding the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp to hold as many as 30,000 deported migrants. Guantanamo Bay has imprisoned hundreds of migrants intercepted at sea and, more notoriously, suspected enemy combatants who were subjected to torture and denial of basic legal rights. Many who have been held at Guantanamo were never formally charged with a crime and were subject to “arbitrary detention” for years. 

The expansion of Guantanamo to hold tens of thousands of detainees is eerily evocative of a previous time in our nation’s history. Our country last employed mass incarceration of this scale during WWII when over 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry were imprisoned at concentration camps and detention centers across the country. That was also done in the name of “national security” and as it was discovered years later that the security threat was a falsified one, we similarly question the urgent threat to our national security. 

It is noteworthy that the expansion of the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay would be “a temporary transit … where we can plus-up thousands and tens of thousands, if necessary, to humanely move illegals out of our country, where they do not belong, back to the countries where they came from in a proper process.” We cannot help but draw parallels to how Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes to “temporary detention centers” for an unknown period of time before being transferred without their constitutional right of due process to more permanent incarceration camp sites deep in the American interior on desolate desserts, mountains, plains, and swamps. 

JACL demands that we not repeat the inhumanity of mass incarceration that has become part of our community’s experienced trauma. As so many Japanese Americans understand, the inhumanity and cruelty of what happened during WWII, enforced by our own government, should never be repeated again.

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The Japanese American Citizens League is a national organization whose ongoing mission is to secure and maintain the civil rights of Japanese Americans and all others who are victimized by injustice and bigotry. The leaders and members of the JACL also work to promote cultural, educational, and social values and preserve the heritage and legacy of the Japanese American community.