Concentration Camps USA, Part 1

on loving ICE and preserving a concentration camp / on stealing history and erasing memory

I have two questions, for starters.

First question: Can anyone explain the two stars hanging off the edge of the blue in this American flag? The flag is hanging on the wall in the Amache Museum in Granada, Colorado, a mile down the road from the Amache concentration camp. I took a picture of the flag when I visited Amache in November 2024. My first thought was that the stars look like they’re running away. They still do. Looking at it again, though, I see a new attitude: they also look like they’re representing rogue states.

Second question: What do these two things have in common?

1. Establishing a Japanese American concentration camp as a National Historic Site.

2. Thanking ICE for “protecting the homeland.”

I asked myself this question in June 2025 when 75 House Democrats endorsed a bill expressing “gratitude to law enforcement officers, including ICE, for protecting the homeland;” I asked myself this question because one of the 75 was Colorado Representative Joe Neguse, who, four years earlier, wrote a bill making the Amache concentration camp, in eastern Colorado, a National Historic Site. How, I wondered, could a person thank ICE and fight to protect a concentration camp?

A naive question, but I’ve been asking it again. For example:

Would Neguse have endorsed a bill during WWII that expressed “gratitude” to the agencies that forcibly removed Japanese Americans from their homes and incarcerated them in Amache?

Will Neguse someday write a bill establishing today’s ICE detention facilities as National Historic Sites?

False equivalences, maybe, but the idea, 80 years ago, of the concentration camps becoming, 80 years in the future, National Historic Sites, would have sounded just as absurd. It sounds, now, just as sinister.

The “I ♡ ICE” bill (as I call it), formally known as House Resolution 488, was drafted on June 9, 2025, in response to an attack that took place in Boulder the week before. On June 1, Mohammed Sabry Soliman, a 45 year-old Egyptian man from Colorado Springs, attacked a pro-Israel rally on Pearl Street with Molotov cocktails while shouting “Free Palestine!” Fifteen people were injured, one of whom, an 84 year-old woman, died a month later from her injuries. HR 488 came fast, and included three resolutions: (1) condemning Soliman and his “antisemitic terrorist attack on peaceful demonstrators supporting the release of the hostages held by Hamas”; (2) affirming that “free and open communication between State and local law enforcement and their Federal counterparts remains the bedrock of public safety;” and (3) expressing “gratitude to law enforcement officers, including ICE, for protecting the homeland.”

HR 488 was essentially a revised version of an earlier bill, HR 476 (written, incidentally, by Neguse), that resolved to condemn “the violent antisemitic attack” and expressed “support for the survivors and their families.” Between the first and second bills, the survivors and their families disappeared and were replaced by law enforcement, support was converted into gratitude. Because in the eyes of the legislators, the true protagonist of the event was—as it always is, in the eyes of legislators—law enforcement. The heroism and hardship was theirs, they were the shining example, they were the beneficiary.

Except for one thing: the only law enforcement agency that was not present in Boulder that day was ICE. And yet, even though ICE was not present and had nothing to do with it, they were added to the bill. It was important, imperative, actually, that they be the beneficiary too.

I don’t know how common it is for legislation to include Thank yous. I do know that legislation sometimes includes apologies—for example, for Japanese American incarceration (Civil Liberties Act, 1988). Apologies layered into legislation are, in terms of the change they produce, contemptuous pieces of theater. I also know that legislation in the United States often includes, and often buried within it, a further entrenchment of the relationship between law enforcement agencies (“free and open communication . . . remains the bedrock of public safety”), with provisions for more money to be thrown at them; more money for the military, policing, weapons, armor, armored vehicles; more money for reforms, which only ever seem to enhance the violence, ineptitude, the violent ineptitude. This is true even of legislation that does not, on the face of it, have anything to do with any of these things.

Predictably and conspicuously absent from HR 488 were Palestine, Gaza, and the genocide. June 1, 2025 was the 603rd day of the latest phase of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. By June 1, 2025, an acknowledged (i.e. at least) 60,000 Palestinians had been murdered, with the actual number being monstrously higher. According to data collected by Australian academics Dr. Richard Hil and Dr. Gideon Polya, the number of deaths, by April 2025, was closer to 680,000. See here.

The people in Boulder, however, were not rallying, on June 1, 2025, around that catastrophe. The people in Boulder were rallying in solidarity with the Israeli hostages, and to raise awareness about them. By June 1, 2025, there were approximately 50 Israeli hostages remaining in Gaza. I didn’t know anyone who, 603 days in, was not aware, exhaustedly, of the Israeli hostages. You would think, based on mainstream media, that the hostages were the whole story. And so I didn’t know anyone who was not even more aware, and even more exhaustedly, that the hostages were being used, by Israel and the United States, and by anyone rallying in their name—including the unfortunate people on Pearl Street—as justification for the genocide. The only time Israel and/or the United States seems to care about people is when they are hostages.

Back to Joe Neguse. According to OpenSecrets, Neguse’s top campaign donor from 2023-2024 was AIPAC, so his obligation is clear. In order to fulfill his obligation, he had to thank ICE. When I saw his name among those who thanked ICE, I thought to myself, Isn’t that the guy who helped make Amache a National Historic Site? Isn’t that like thanking the people who made Amache in the first place?

These two things—thanking ICE and fighting to protect a concentration camp—are not unrelated. They exist on the same spectrum. Both are acts of white nationalism. Both prioritize and maintain a white nationalist narrative of US history. Both serve, therefore, to steal and rewrite history. And both serve, therefore again, to manage the erasure of people and their memory.

Amache (pop. 7,318) was one of the ten main concentration camps—among the hundreds of incarceration sites—where Japanese and Okinawan immigrants and American citizens were incarcerated during WWII. It opened August 1942 and closed October 1945, after which it was dismantled, dispersed, left to be overtaken by the earth. It is, as are all of the concentration camp sites, remote, not a place one simply happens upon, and subliminal, easy to miss even if you know where it is.

It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006. Prior to that, it was a memorial/pilgrimage site for survivors and descendants. The first pilgrimage was in 1976. In the 1980s, a group of survivors erected a memorial. The inscription was substantial, addressed the injustice and racism of incarceration, referred to the prisoners as prisoners and to Amache as a concentration camp. That is, until the local town council, down the road in Granada, intervened. After an intense struggle the inscription was revised; all of the above-mentioned things (injustice, racism, prisoners, concentration camp) were stripped. It was edited down from nine long sentences, which constituted a crucial, meaningful, accurate narrative, to one sentence, which begins with an acknowledgment of the “patriotic Japanese-Americans” who served in the war.”

Even after it became a National Historic Landmark, Amache was managed, for years, by a local high school teacher, John Hopper, and his students. The Amache Preservation Society was, and still is, one of Hopper’s classes; his students run the Amache Museum. Although the APS, the class, and the museum all still exist, Amache is now being managed by the National Park Service.

When my students and I visited Amache, in November 2024, we got a tour of the reconstructed barracks by one of the newly-appointed National Park Service rangers. I was curious to see how Amache’s conversion to a National Park Service site was impacting the way its story was being told. The answer came too quickly.

Our tour guide was a white man in his mid-to-late twenties (that’s how old he seemed, anyway). Without much context or preamble, he jumped into telling us about the barrack construction, how the barracks were made, etc., but because the barracks were basically sheds, there was not much to say. And yet he managed to stretch that story out anyway.

The construction crews “worked day and night,” he said, as if that was the heart of the drama.

He talked about how the barracks were “ergonomic.”

He talked about the “skill and ingenuity” of the prisoners in transforming the “empty barracks into homes.”

He told jokes, including one about how there were no cell phones in the 1940s, so people didn’t have to fight over who got to charge their phone first.

It felt like he was giving us a tour not of a concentration camp, but a Revolutionary War-era house in New England, with spinning wheels and butter churns. I grew up in New England, I went on elementary school field trips to those houses. I remember peering, from behind ropes, into bedrooms with brass bed warmers and banister-backed rocking chairs in the corners. Just as I knew nothing about the people who slept and dreamed and ached and died in those rooms, I could ascertain nothing—I could feel nothing—about the people who slept and dreamed and ached and died in the barracks. It was as if everything I knew about Amache was being blotted out. It was as if we were being given a tour of somewhere and something else.

I asked one of my students, Margot (thank you Margot), what she remembered about the tour. She texted me a picture of her journal from that day. Underneath her drawing of the barrack, she wrote: “where the park ranger said the J slur.”

She couldn’t remember if he was reading something or if he was mimicking what people used to say “back then.” Or if he just said it. Either way, he just said it.

There were several Japanese American students in my class, including one who had family in camp, so I thought: if this guy is comfortable saying racist, disrespectful, ridiculous shit to us, imagine what he says to tours of white people…

This experience was not an anomaly; this is not a story about a rogue ranger. I have had similar experiences at other incarceration sites, memorials and museums. At the Topaz concentration camp, in Utah, for example. I was standing with the white director of the local museum on a dirt road on the western edge of the site, when she told me a story in which she also quoted the “J slur.” Because the story would not have been authentic, apparently, without her spelling it out, without her spilling it all over the both of us. So, 750 miles away from Amache, another steward of Japanese American history was just saying it too.

There was something worse being conveyed, though, than stale racism—which, however startling it might have been, was not unexpected. After all, we were standing in a house that racism built, and racism does not simply evaporate when the house is torn down. What was worse was the aching lack of what we were hoping to gain: insight, however fleeting it might have been, into the past, into the truth of Amache, the truth of the mass incarceration of a people. That is what Amache becoming a National Historic Site was supposed to provide. (Again, my naivete.)

“Amache is a story we cannot forget,” said Mitch Homma, of the Amache Alliance. “With the Amache National Historic Site Act we have a chance to preserve, honor, and protect it.” But what, exactly, is the story we cannot forget? Is it the story that is being told at Amache? That “J*ps” were ingenious interior designers of their own ergonomic prisons? Because for that story we were gaining, instead, insight—not fleeting, but tedious—into the present. So I guess, in that sense, we were gaining insight into the truth of Amache.

It is important to note that survivors and descendants, like Homma, were involved in the effort to designate Amache a National Historic Site. One of the keystone testimonies delivered before Congress on HR 2497 (the Amache National Historic Site Act), was from Robert (Bob) Fuchigami, perhaps the most prominent and outspoken survivor of Amache, and the most tireless advocate of its preservation. Fuchigami, an educator and author, was 11 when he was incarcerated, with his family, in Amache. He wrote about his experience, and about Amache in his 2020 book, Amache Remembered. Fuchigami was 90 then. He passed away last year. “The Amache story is not over,” Fuchigami said, in his testimony. “Asians in America are still discriminated against, treated as invisible, and suffer from hate crimes to this day. Designating Amache a national park site would shine a light on our forgotten history and help tell a more complete story of America. Amache is our collective story. It is an American story.”

I cannot begrudge Fuchigami, or any survivor or descendant, the attempt to ensure that the dark past is illuminated, that a light be shined on “forgotten history.” It’s an attempt we must continue to make (I’m attempting it now, in this writing.) But it’s frustrating that the community entrusted the government to do that. It’s frustrating because the community already knows that the government does not do that; that the government ensures that history is forgotten by ensuring it is remembered wrong and/or misremembered. It’s frustrating that we don’t seem to trust enough in our own embodiments, our own natural, unmediated ability to possess and narrate our own stories, to shine the light with our own lives. And so it’s frustrating how dimly the light is going to shine, and how short its reach will be.

In March 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which complains that there is a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history” by focusing on the histories and legacies of white supremacy, and everyone and everything that suffers in its path and in its wake; that by illuminating basic truths, radical ideologues were making American look bad. Signs began appearing at sites under the Department of Interior’s jurisdiction—National Historic Sites, for example—telling people to report anything that portrays the US in a negative light. To make it easy, the signs come with QR codes. And yet, as cartoonishly villainous—as fascist—as these signs are, they must be recognized and understood as functioning on precisely the same spectrum as the Granada town council removing all references to injustice and racism on the Amache survivors’ monument, and revising the inscription down to meaninglessness. The town council exercised the same white nativism as expressed by EO 14253, only they did so preemptively and privately: the survivors’ experience was censored behind-the-scenes, before it could reach the public. While The Trump Administration is attempting to erase history, the town council actually erased it. It amounts, though, to the same violence, the same process of commandeering the story of a people, rewriting it, then telling it back to the people. The survivors, in this dynamic, become consultants; their stories, once stolen, can be taken or left, in whole or in part, revised, censored, translated into comedy, or not translated at all.

A concentration camp becoming a National Historic Site is not a victory; it is the next phase in the life of that concentration camp. Because it is still a concentration camp, which means that it is still working on behalf of the nation, and against the people for whom it was built. Concentration camps are how the United States speaks. Concentration camps have an American accent.

I wrote earlier (above) that ICE was not present in Boulder on June 1, 2025, and that they had nothing to do with it. It’s not true that they had nothing to do with it. Two days after the attack, Soliman’s family—his wife, Hayam El Gamal, and her five children—were detained by ICE in Colorado Springs. They were brought to an ICE facility 40 miles south, on the edge of a small airfield, then sent the other way to Denver, where they were flown to San Antonio, Texas. From there they were taken to the largest family detention center in the United States, in Dilley, TX. That was eight months ago. They are still there: Hayam, two 5-year-old twins, a 9-year-old, a 16-year-old, and the oldest, Habiba, who had just graduated high school when the family was detained.

When Habiba turned 18, she was separated from the rest of the family and detained in the adult section of the detention center, where she is now, and where she is being denied the right to visit her family. According to the family’s lawyer, Eric Lee, she is also being denied “religious accommodations as a practicing Muslim, based on retribution for her decision to speak out to the media last week.” Lee shared a three-page letter Habiba wrote expressing her anger, dismay and desperation, and describing her family’s situation and the conditions of the detention center. “We have been stripped of the right to have a say about our lives,” Habiba wrote. “The Gov. wants to control and determine how our lives will go.”

A fundraising campaign has been organized on the family’s behalf.

In his interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Eric Lee reiterated the role of the Democratic Party in the foundation and maintenance of ICE detention. Dilley was opened in December 2014 by the Obama Administration to incarcerate mothers and children from Central America. It was one of four family detention centers opened by Obama. Immigrants rights advocates and organizations condemned the plan to open the detention center, and sued the Obama Administration after it opened. Lee was on Democracy Now one day before the general strike on January 30. “The Democratic Party is as equally responsible as Trump for creating the infrastructure of mass family and adult detention in this country,” Lee said, “and it is necessary that this protest movement stay a hundred miles away from the Democratic Party and develop its orientation to the working class. That’s the only way that Dilley is going to be shut down, that the families inside, like my clients, are going to be freed.”

End of Part 1.

To be continued…