How historical memory fueled last weekend’s detention center protest in the East Bay

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The Weekly Dispatch

Community-powered immigration news from the Bay Area.

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Welcome to El Tímpano’s Weekly Dispatch. I’m Erica Hellerstein, senior immigration, labor and economics reporter.

Growing up, Doug Yoshida’s parents didn’t share many details about their imprisonment in what the government called “internment camps” during World War II. But still, what they endured was always in the background of his family life. The Bay Area physician’s father and mother were among the approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who were incarcerated in U.S. camps following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Yoshida’s father was just 15 years old when his family was forced from their home and sent to a racetrack-turned-temporary detention facility in San Bruno. They were housed in horse stables, where they had to construct mattresses out of hay over feces-strewn floors.

Recently, Yoshida has begun publicly sharing this chapter of his family’s story. Like many Japanese Americans who have opposed the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda, Yoshida sees echoes of his parents’ plight in the present. “I think this has really activated the Japanese American community because of the parallels,” he said.

Among Yoshida’s many concerns is a potential Trump administration plan to reopen a scandal-plagued prison in the East Bay as an immigrant detention center. Last weekend, he joined dozens of protesters in Dublin to oppose the conversion of the former women’s prison, FCI Dublin, into what would be Northern California’s first ICE detention facility. The prison was shuttered last year after seven former guards were found guilty of sexually abusing female inmates. Sexual violence inside its walls was so rampant that prisoners and staff called it the “rape club.”

Since reports surfaced that the Trump administration might convert the facility into a detention center, Bay Area residents have pushed back forcefully, organizing multiple rounds of protests. What stood out about last weekend’s demonstration was the way protesters invoked the memory of the past to resist what’s unfolding in the present. In many ways, it was an action rooted in the long shadow of history: how the trauma of Japanese American detention has rippled across the generations, and continues to shape the outlook of survivors and their descendants today. One of the slogans of Tsuru for Solidarity, the Japanese American-led group that organized the event, is “stop repeating history.”

Tsuru centers its advocacy on ending detention in the U.S. The organization was borne out of the first Trump administration, when a group of Japanese American survivors of incarceration and their families protested family separations in front of a Texas ICE detention center, just 40 miles from Crystal City, what was once the country’s only detention facility for families. “Organizers couldn’t ignore the fact that on the very same highway, history was being repeated again,” the group explained. “[They] felt compelled to stand in solidarity with the imprisoned families.”

That sentiment was echoed by numerous demonstrators at Saturday’s protest, who highlighted the continuities between the wartime detention of Japanese Americans and the Trump administration’s treatment of immigrants today. One salient point of historical overlap: The recent deportation of roughly 260 Venezuelans to a mega-prison in El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely-used wartime law that was last invoked by President Roosevelt, paving the way for the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the World War II.

Marissa Seko of the Oakland-based Family Violence Law Center told protestors about her grandmother’s imprisonment in Arizona during the 1940s. As a child, Seko recalled, her grandmother would talk about what it was like to lose everything after being forced from her home to the camp: “how they had to put the feet of the beds in buckets of water to prevent the desert scorpions from climbing up and stinging them in the night as they slept.” Now, Seko continued, “we’ve been seeing the images from the new ICE detention facilities the Trump administration is opening, which look strikingly similar and sometimes even worse than the Japanese internment [incarceration] camps. Men, women and children are being forced into literal cages and denied their rights and their dignity all over again, in a disgraceful replication of the mistakes of our past.”

If reopened, FCI Dublin would become the only immigrant detention center in Northern California. Currently, there are six detention centers statewide, all located in Central and Southern California. As of June 2025, at least 3,200 immigrants were held across the five centers, according to data I analyzed from the ICE Detention Tracker.

If the Dublin facility is converted, it would likely be run by a private prison company. All six of California’s detention centers are operated by private prison companies through contracts with the federal government, and numerous centers have faced long-standing allegations of abuse and human rights violations. Given FCI Dublin’s harrowing history of sexual violence, opponents of the detention center’s reopening are especially concerned about the potential for detainee mistreatment.

“We have every reason to believe that ICE would carry on that tradition of abuse, retaliation and medical neglect,” Seko said. “The prison was closed for good reason and should remain closed.”

In a country of immigrants, so many people living in the U.S. carry stories like those demonstrators shared: family stories of violence, trauma, and rebuilding that bind their understanding of the present to the past. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how historical and family memory is shaping peoples’ responses to the current climate. Do you have a story or reflection you’d like to share? Please feel free to respond to me directly.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading and see you next week.

Ear to the Ground

El Tímpano’s text messaging (SMS) service reaches more than 6,000 Spanish-speaking immigrants across the Bay Area. Our subscribers are increasingly worried about ICE activities and the potential proximity of these operations to their homes. We have seen an increase in questions asking for information about ICE activity alerts in their neighborhoods. Below are some of their responses:

I want to know if immigration has been conducting raids in Hayward. Do you have any information on this?

Quiero saber si inmigración ha estado haciendo redadas en Hayward. ¿Tiene información de esto?

–Hayward resident 

Where can I see if ICE is in my area in Contra Costa [County]?

¿Dónde puedo ver si ICE está en mi área en [el condado de] Contra Costa?

–Hercules resident 

I would like to know which cities ICE agents are visiting and what authority they have over the population.

Me gustaría saber qué ciudades están visitando los agentes de ICE y qué autoridad tienen sobre la población.

–Concord resident 

• The makeup of undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles: The USC Dornsife Equity Research Institute (ERI) recently published an in-depth report on the demographic breakdown of undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles County and the impact of ICE raids on the local economy. Some useful stats: Over one-third of LA county residents are immigrants and roughly one-quarter of the county’s immigrants are undocumented.

• Economic impact of ICE raids in CA: A recent study by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute found that mass deportations in California could cost the state a staggering $275 billion due to the loss of undocumented workers and their impact on the local economy if they withdraw from the labor force. According to the study, the Bay Area has the second-largest population of immigrants statewide, behind Los Angeles, with undocumented immigrants making up 7% of the region’s population. “With the nation’s largest state economy where immigrants comprise nearly one-third of the population, disruptions in California would reverberate nationwide,” the report’s authors concluded.
   

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