SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
In a bid to speed up the deportation of alleged gang members from Venezuela, President Trump has invoked a 1798 law called the Alien Enemies Act. His use of the law is being challenged in the courts. It's only been used a handful of times in American history and always during war. The last time came on the heels of Pearl Harbor and America's entry into World War II. Concerned that Americans overseas would be seen as spies and captured by the Axis powers, President Roosevelt's administration came up with an elaborate plan to find people who could be exchanged for American prisoners of war. The government turned to Latin America and offered to intern allegedly dangerous enemy aliens, immigrants from Germany, Japan and Italy. Thousands were arrested and deported to the U.S. where they were incarcerated in camps. "Radio Diaries" brings us their stories.
KARIN SCHRAMM: My name is Karin Schramm. Both my parents were from Germany, and my father went to Ecuador in 1928. They had their German friends and Ecuadorian friends, and they were very happy.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SCHRAMM: My mother used to write diaries, and after the war started, she wrote about my father, Wolfgang. This was one of those entries.
(Reading) December 23, 1943, I will never forget that day or that hour. Suddenly, a military vehicle stopped in front of our door. I held my breath. Two American soldiers holding rifles had picked Wolfgang up. I felt an enormous emptiness, and I stayed behind alone with my three small children.
LIBIA YAMAMOTO: My name is Libia Yamamoto, and my parents are Japanese. We lived in Chiclayo, which is northern Peru, and my father had a store there. I was 7 1/2 when my father was taken. It was January 3, and that was when the police came to the house, took my father to jail. He couldn't understand why because he had not done anything wrong. After the truck disappeared in the distance, I asked my mother, where is he going? And she said, don't know. It was like he was being kidnapped.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #1: Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States.
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: Today's threat to our national security is not a matter of military weapons alone. Spies, saboteurs...
TERESA VAN HOY: My name is Teresa Van Hoy. I am professor of history at St. Mary's University.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ROOSEVELT: They must not be allowed to spread in the new world as they have in the old.
VAN HOY: This is a memorandum for the attorney general, March 27, 1942. They, the State Department, have arranged for two vessels, which will pick up the aliens from the West Coast of South America. One vessel will have 700 males. The other vessel - there will be 250 men, women, and children, a total of 950 enemy aliens.
SCHRAMM: We were taken and used as, like, hostages to be exchanged with American prisoners of war. And there were FBI agents throughout the whole of Latin America, looking for people who were convenient for this purpose.
VAN HOY: Many Latin American authorities did not want to do this, did not want to round up its citizens who had never broken any law, including the women and children. But we exercised a lot of clout, and the U.S. authorities threatened to boycott their goods in our markets. So we sent our transport ships to pick them up. We brought them here, and then held them on grounds that they had entered the United States illegally.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR #1: The filming of the Crystal City facility, what you are about to see - a family facility 110 miles southwest of San Antonio shows how men, women and children, detainees of World War II, lived, worked and played.
CHIEKO KAMISATO: My name is Chieko Kamisato. I was an internee in Crystal City, Texas, in 1944. When we arrived to United States, we had to strip, you know, naked completely, and they sprayed us with DDT.
KAZUMU JULIO CESAR NAGANUMA: My mom thought they were just going to kill us. In a way, she was relieved when we got to the camp because she saw Japanese faces. My name is Kazumu Julio Cesar Naganuma. My friends call me Kaz.
KAMISATO: The U.S. took our passport. Everything was stripped from us, but my mother said we were going to be reunited with dad. He came, and all three of us kind of jumped on him and hugged him, and he still had his mustache, and he still wore glasses. But he had lost a lot of weight. His face was skinny, hollow. He just looked fragile.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VAN HOY: The Department of Justice produced a propaganda film about life in the camp, touting its good care and happy families.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR #2: Crystal City is an extremely isolated spot, and good food was good for morale in a climate which often reaches 120 degrees.
SCHRAMM: The climate was terrible because it was even hotter than Ecuador, and there were rattlesnakes and scorpions.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR #2: This is the perimeter over which armed guards kept a 24-hour watch. At night, the illumination from the lights along the top of this fence was visible almost to the Mexican border.
NAGANUMA: They built a whole community there. I mean, it became a real city, of course, that was a prison.
VAN HOY: Germans were housed in one section. Japanese were housed in another section. There was a laundromat, a butcher shop, a hospital, schools.
YAMAMOTO: The guard tower was what was really intimidating because on the top of the tower, there were soldiers, and they had machine guns facing us - not facing outside, but facing us - so we couldn't go near the fence.
KAMISATO: It was understood that we cannot leave at all. There was one incident when they were playing baseball, and the ball went out of the fence. And this little boy wanted to try and retrieve the ball. And that's when the gunshot went up. There were a warning, you know, not to ever, ever go near the fence.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR #3: We are setting a standard for the rest of the world in the treatment of people who may have loyalties to an enemy nation. We are protecting ourselves without violating the principles of Christian decency.
VAN HOY: The United States needed to reassure the Germans, hey, we're taking care of your people, make sure and take care of ours.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SCHRAMM: Diary entry, January 1945.
(Reading) A list was published with names of hostages who had been chosen to be exchanged for American prisoners of war. Our names were not on the list. And from Paraguay, Bolivia and other South American nations, more families kept coming.
KAMISATO: A lot of people from our camp, they were deported to Japan as exchange prisoners. And thank God my father fought against going to Japan. A very close friend of my father sent a telegram. People are suffering so much. It's devastating over here.
SCHRAMM: Germany was being bombed by Americans. There was war everywhere.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VAN HOY: So we found a ship manifest from the February 15, 1944 voyage. Seventy-six percent of the people on that boat were from Latin America. They were sent on to Germany, and in exchange, Americans won their freedom.
SCHRAMM: Diary entry, May 1945.
(Reading) We are still in the camp in Texas, behind walls and barbed wire. We ask daily, what will become of us?
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #2: President Truman announced the official surrender.
HARRY TRUMAN: This is a solemn but glorious hour. General Eisenhower informs me that the forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations.
NAGANUMA: Well, the war's over, but we basically had no country. We never got a passport, no visa, no nothing. What we do have is papers from the government saying that we are illegal aliens. And yet, they don't mention that they brought us here (laughter).
VAN HOY: Nobody was in any kind of hurry to liberate the enemy alien camps, and they languished for months and years, in some cases.
YAMAMOTO: I was interned from 1943 to 1947, four years. The government said, You either go to Japan or go back to Peru. We were Peruvians, but the Peru government wouldn't take us. They didn't want us back. And in Japan, it was war devastated.
NAGANUMA: In order to get out of camp, you have to have a sponsor family, and you're supposed to have a job.
KAMISATO: We had this lawyer that helped us, and he found this food-processing (ph) company in Seabrook, New Jersey, and they needed labor over there, and they were able to sponsor us, and that was the only way we were able to leave camp. We had to start all over again, and that's where I get very angry for my parents to go through all of the hardship because they had to suffer. So I mean, (crying) it was not easy.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
VAN HOY: Upon release from Crystal City, people were required to sign a confidentiality document saying that they could not speak of the experience to anyone. And they did not because they had already lived through years of imprisonment, so they weren't going to take any chances.
NAGANUMA: For me, I always credit my mom that - for the family's sake, to take us through that. We were kidnapped from another country, and yet they hardly complained.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
NAGANUMA: Part of this is the Japanese culture. You might have heard the term gaman. You just deal with it. You know, you live through it. Gaman is, you know, just suck it up.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DETROW: More than 6,000 people - men, women, and children - were taken from Latin America and incarcerated in camps in the United States during World War II. A few of the remaining survivors, who you heard in the story, will travel to Crystal City, Texas, this fall to visit the camp where they spent part of their childhood. This story was produced by JoAnn DeLuna and Nellie Gilles of Radio Diaries. You can find more stories on the "Radio Diaries" podcast.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.