From Crystal City to South Shore

Texas and Chicago are the two U.S. cities I consider home. My heart is breaking for both of them.

 
In Texas, concertina wire cuts into the Rio Grande. Arbitrary fences divide communities and families. People are forced into detention centers with inhumane conditions.

In Chicago, ICE agents are breaking down doors of apartment complexes and homeless shelters, waking children in the middle of the night and forcing them into the street without clothes, spreading fear across entire neighborhoods.

The “border” is not just a line on a map. It follows people into their homes, their workplaces, their schools. It moves at the will of political leaders.

It was in Chicago, studying Asian American history at DePaul, where I learned about Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced removal and imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese people. Most were citizens. All of them targeted not for what they had done, but for who they were.

Last week, I visited Crystal City while touring the border with the Texas Civil Rights Project, and stood on the grounds of a former incarceration camp where Japanese American families once lived behind barbed wire. All traces of its existence are gone now, save for a few historical markers and concrete slabs that were once foundations of the cottages.

That evening, as the group gathered to leave for dinner, Border Patrol trucks and police cars suddenly surrounded our charter bus in the hotel parking lot. The sight of armed officers boarding and questioning one of our participants, who they’d seen exploring the property, left me shaken.

 
In that moment, the line between past and present blurred. It was a palpable reminder that state power always asserts itself through fear. Still renders people as criminal simply for existing. “Enemy alien.”

That memory weighs even heavier knowing that Fort Bliss, which was part of that same system of wartime incarceration, is again being used to detain migrants in Texas today.

Here, there. Then, now. Entire communities marked as suspect, stripped of rights, and forced to live in fear. The echoes of history are deafening. And they demand more than remembrance. We must refuse them.