https://www.fcd-us.org/a-solidarity-moment-rooted-in-historical-lesssons/
Stories of Power, Agency, Resilience, and Kinship: Authors from academia, advocacy, organizing, and beyond share what it means to meet this moment with courage, clarity, creativity, and conviction as they work to protect and support children in immigrant families.
Child detention is a trauma that Japanese American elders know too well. Elders from my community, including my mother, who were just children in 1942, were forcibly removed along with 125,000 other Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants and incarcerated in U.S. internment camps.
So, when the first Trump administration separated children from their parents at the border in 2018, caging them, and turning a blind eye to abuses, we had to act.
In 2019, I, along with a multigenerational group of Japanese Americans — elders who were interned during World War II and their descendants — blocked the gates of the Fort Sill detention center in Lawton, Oklahoma, where the government was planning to detain 1,600 immigrant children. The U.S. government had used the same place as an internment camp for our people during World War II, where over 90 Buddhist priests were imprisoned, and 2 Japanese American immigrants were executed by Fort Sill guards.
Blocking the gates of Fort Sill as an act of civil disobedience was one of the genesis points of our organization, Tsuru for Solidarity.
Our work has embraced non-violent direct action and civil disobedience to interrupt the repetition of our history. It is paired with cross-community solidarity, healing, and repair organizing that creates the connective tissue of resilience and strength for personal, community, and societal transformation.
Solidarity as a Practice of Protection
Our solidarity work is rooted in shared intersectional histories of forced removal, mass incarceration, separation of families, deportation, and state violence. We believe solidarity also embraces and follows the leadership of impacted communities at the front lines. Deep relational commitment allows us to access collective strength and build new community bonds that support healing from multigenerational trauma rooted in state violence. From our own historical legacy, we commit to “being the allies that our community needed during WWII.” We stand in solidarity with other targeted communities because no one should fight alone, and when we stand together and fight back, we win.
We are fierce advocates for children because they are often the most vulnerable part of our communities. They must rely on adults to protect their human rights. Because of whistleblowers, rights violations in detention centers have been well-documented. Inside Fort Bliss, where the federal government planned to incarcerate 10,000 unaccompanied children in 2022, children weren’t allowed to change clothes, shower, or go outside for weeks. Food was rotten. Case workers lost track of who was even there. Through protests across the country over several years, we helped end family detention and the expansion of large congregate sites for unaccompanied migrant children during that era.
Now, child and family detention and deportation have restarted:
- This year, in Louisiana, ICE has rounded up families, put them in hotels to avoid due process, and secretly deported them. In some cases, the children have U.S. citizenship.
- In March, the Karnes and Dilley immigration detention centers reopened in Texas, followed by Fort Bliss in Montana in August. Dilley is 40 miles away from a former internment camp where Japanese Americans were forcibly confined.
- In late August, the current administration tried to deport unaccompanied minors to Guatemala, outside the rule of law and in the middle of the night, stopped only by advocates racing to get an injunction.
- In late September, helicopters descended on a housing development in Chicago, supposedly looking for gang members, but instead ICE agents zip-tied children and took them away in rented box trucks.
These crimes against children and families call us to act again to restore protections for children.
Building a National Movement for Children and Families
Today, groups across sectors — legal, policy, and grassroots organizing — are working closely together with the understanding that we must link hands to restore the rule of law, the safety of children, and the sanctity of families.
We have reactivated and combined our previous coalitions on family and child detention (National Child Detention Coalition and the Family Liberation Abolitionist Network) to form the National Coalition to End Family and Child Detention, with over 40 organizations from across the country.
Our organization, Tsuru for Solidarity, is helping churches and communities gather families in nourishing ways: spiritual renewal.
New partners in the work - such as the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice - are leading the formation of a new campaign to #FreeFamilies, inviting communities around the country to create and coordinate actions to call for an end to family separation, detention, and deportation.
It’s a hopeful moment.
Working in solidarity, we are bringing families and communities back to the center of public life. Most Americans share the same core beliefs: Families deserve support. Children deserve protection.
Reclaiming Family Values and Strengthening Community
This is the foundation of #FreeFamilies, a new pilot initiative that equips churches, community groups, neighbors, and networks with practical tools to support, nourish, and uplift families. The idea is simple: create weekly spaces where communities gather to care for children and for the adults who raise them. When parents receive connection, encouragement, and support, they gain the strength they need. When children are surrounded by a caring village, they thrive.
#FreeFamilies is rooted in a simple idea: every family belongs, and every family deserves to live freely. Immigrant families, mixed-status families, chosen families, LGBTQIA+ families—all families deserve safety, dignity, community, and freedom — and no child or family should experience separation, detention, or deportation. Through this effort, we are reclaiming the principles that define this country: compassion, solidarity, and a commitment to an open future for everyone.
These are family values.
In a time of rising violence, despair, and threats to democracy, we cannot collapse internally. We sustain our strength by caring for each other — by refusing to turn away from others’ suffering.
Don’t give up. Protect each other. Care for each other. Stay connected. Work together. Provide mutual aid. Speak out. Show up. Build community.
This is the work our coalition is doing: strengthening the internal fabric of society so that families can endure.
In Japanese, there is a phrase that means, “I offer gratitude, for I exist within your care and because of you.”
Okagesama de.
That’s why we keep showing up.