After the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 (CLA) and the push for appropriations to fund reparations, redress finally became a reality in 1990, as the presidential apology and redress checks were delivered to Japanese Americans. Then NCRR began to hear of various people being denied redress. It was then that we learned about the outrageous story of what happened to Japanese Latin Americans during World War II and how they were again being subjected to injustice.
From 1941 to 1943, 2,264 Japanese Latin Americans (JLAs) were apprehended and uprooted from their families and communities in thirteen Latin American countries and brought to the United States, where they were interned at the Department of Justice camp in Crystal City, Texas. Why? Just like Japanese Americans, JLAs had done nothing wrong. However, the U.S. government, which orchestrated this program, sought people to be used as hostages in exchange for American citizens held in the Far East war zone. Two prisoner exchanges were implemented during the war.
As JLAs were processed into the United States, they were declared “illegal aliens.” The 1,400 JLAs who were not used in the prisoner exchange were kept interned in Crystal City. In September 1945, the Department of State was authorized to deport “enemy aliens” in the United States who had been brought from Latin America. The remaining interned JLAs were told that they were “illegal aliens” and subject to deportation.
Their former Latin American countries for the most part refused to readmit JLAs, and most of them were deported to war-devastated Japan. Some of those who remained were paroled to Seabrook Farms in New Jersey. In 1954, after Congress passed a law permitting former JLA internees to apply for permanent residency status, some JLAs were able to obtain that status made retroactive to the war years.
When the redress program under the CLA began in 1990, the Japanese American community finally felt some redemption and healing. However, when JLAs applied for redress, they were told that they were ineligible because the CLA stipulated that recipients had to have been permanent resident aliens or citizens at the time of incarceration. Since the government had proclaimed JLAs “illegal aliens” during the war, they were deemed ineligible for redress.
In response to this act of adding insult to injury, in 1996, NCRR joined with the Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project, Japanese American Citizens League, and the Southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union to form Campaign for Justice: Redress Now for Japanese Latin Americans! (CFJ). Our first action was to file a class-action lawsuit, Mochizuki v. United States, on behalf of JLAs who had been denied redress.
In 1998, CFJ negotiated a settlement of the Mochizuki lawsuit with the Department of Justice. Based on money remaining in the CLA fund, an offer of $5,000 per individual internee was made to compensate for what the government had done to JLAs during WWII. This was of course only one-fourth of the amount that individual Japanese Americans had received. After much discussion, CFJ agreed to the offer. But the settlement was bittersweet, and CFJ committed itself to seek redress equity for JLAs.
CFJ was fortunate to gain the support of Representative Xavier Becerra (CA-D), who introduced the Wartime Parity and Justice Act of 2000, which called for redress equity for JLAs and redress for Japanese Americans whose claims had been denied owing to technicalities in the language of the CLA. The bill also called for the fulfillment of the educational mandate of the CLA--only $5 million of the $50 million intended by Congress to be used for education about the incarceration was actually funded. In July 2001, Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI) introduced the Wartime Parity and Justice Act in the Senate. The bill was reintroduced in Congress again in 2003 and 2005 but did not gain enough support for passage.
In January 2007, Sen. Inouye and Rep. Becerra introduced HR662/S381, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Latin Americans of Japanese Descent. The bill was patterned after the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, which held hearings in 1981 and made recommendations for redress. These recommendations were instrumental in the formulation of the CLA. CFJ is seeking timely passage of the bill and subsequent hearings on the JLA experience so that redress equity might be achieved before it is too late for JLA former internees, who have waited for twenty years after the CLA and almost 70 years after WWII.
HR662 has been placed in the Immigration Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee. CFJ is pushing for a hearing on the bill by the subcommittee before the end of this session in September, which would greatly enhance chances for passage of the bill.