John Tateishi was just under three years old when he was sent to prison.

He was never arrested or charged with a crime. But like over 120,000 other Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans, he and his family were rounded up and sent on buses to prison camps in the West during World War II, the result of wartime paranoia and racism following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.

Now, Tateishi sees a disturbing parallel between his experience and the Trump administration’s frenzied push to detain and deport thousands of immigrants, many of them Hispanic and Latino, with little due process.

There are clear differences between the Trump administration’s current immigration blitz and the incarceration of Japanese Americans. The contemporary immigration crackdown has involved campaigns across the country purportedly to enforce existing immigration law, while Japanese Americans were incarcerated under the guise of wartime necessity just based on their ethnicity, even when there was no accusation they had broken any laws.

But there are also striking throughlines.

Fort Bliss, a sprawling military base in the desert in El Paso, Texas, where Japanese and Japanese American people, Italians and Germans were held during WWII, has been repurposed for the immigration crackdown. It’s now home to Camp East Montana, one of the nation’s largest centers for detaining people accused of immigration-related violations, where at least three people in custody have died in the last two months.

The Japanese American Citizens League called the use of the facility to detain people accused of immigration violations “a disgrace to the memory and legacy of the more than 125,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans unjustly imprisoned during World War II.”

Like two-thirds of the people incarcerated without charge in 10 prison camps during WWII, Tateishi, now 86, is an American citizen. So were his parents; his grandparents had immigrated to the US from Japan and built their lives in California, he told CNN.

But the US government treated all Japanese immigrants and their descendants as suspect. The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was used to detain foreign nationals, many of them Japanese, while Executive Order 9066 was used to detain and incarcerate people of Japanese descent from the West Coast en masse, including US citizens.

In his second term, President Donald Trump invoked the same sweeping wartime legislation – the Alien Enemies Act – used to lock up Japanese nationals to expedite the deportations of Venezuelans, whom he claims were suspected gang members and criminals “invading” the US. In September, a federal appeals court ruled Trump’s use of the act, which deportees say led to months of torture at a mega-prison in El Salvador before they were released in July, was unlawful.

A White House spokesperson defended the president’s authority “to conduct national security operations” and told The Associated Press in September “we expect to be vindicated on the merits in this case.” The case is ongoing.

Satsuki Ina, who was born behind barbed wire at the Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum‑security prison camp in Northern California, said she identifies “completely” with what’s happening today.

“The similarities are profound” between the Japanese American experience and the operations targeting immigrants in the US today, the 81-year-old told CNN.

“The hatred, the criminalization by race and ethnicity, the false narratives – calling people today rapists and criminals, and we were called saboteurs and spies.”

Hiroshi Shimizu, 82, who spent his earliest years in multiple camps, including Tule Lake and Crystal City in Texas, said he didn’t fully grasp what had been taken from him until later in life when he saw his grandchildren “going through the same ages that I was when I was in prison and all the wonderful things they’re able to do being free.”

Decades later, the US acknowledged the imprisonment was based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership” and granted reparation payments of $20,000 to each survivor.

Now, according to Tateishi – who helped lead the campaign for reparations – it’s as if all that progress has been undone.

“It feels like everything that we’ve held sacred in this country, and that so many people fought for and died for, almost has no meaning,” he said.

Just hours after bombs began raining down on Oahu, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, two FBI agents arrived unannounced at Nikki Nojima Louis’ home in Seattle’s Japantown.

The agents pushed through the door and ransacked the family’s belongings. They took away her father, who was born in Japan.

It was her fourth birthday.

“After that, we never lived together as a family again,” Louis, now 88, told CNN.

Arrested alongside other community leaders, ministers and business owners as a potential security risk, Louis’ father was interrogated and later sent to the Justice Department’s all‑male “enemy alien” camps in Lordsburg and Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he remained until 1946, a year after the war ended.

Louis and her mother were left behind in Seattle – until two months later, in February 1942, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the mass removal of people of Japanese ancestry, including US citizens, from the West Coast. They were incarcerated at Camp Minidoka, a concentration camp in south-central Idaho, where they lived in a single room in drafty barracks partitioned by thin walls. There was a metal cot, a coal-burning stove and a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Winters dropped below zero; summers climbed past 100 degrees.

And similar scenes of fear and dispossession played out across the country, as Japanese Americans were forced to leave behind their homes and livelihoods and bused to remote camps.

Ina’s parents – both American citizens – were forced from their San Francisco home and confined to the Tanforan racetrack detention center in San Bruno. Her mother was pregnant with her older brother.

After answering “no” to two questions on the government’s so‑called loyalty questionnaire, the family was transferred to Tule Lake, where those deemed “disloyal” were held under tighter security. Ina was born there and, along with her family, classified as an “alien enemy,” she said.

Her father later protested the drafting of young men from inside the camps to fight overseas. He was charged with sedition and sent to a federal prison in North Dakota.

During their imprisonment, Ina’s mother kept a diary. She wrote, “I wonder if today is the day they’re going to line us up and shoot us.”

Tateishi can still remember the day he arrived at Manzanar in California’s Owens Valley.

Over the course of three years in the isolated desert camp, he came to understand that they were in prison. “I was able to deduce that the only reason we’re here is because we’re Japanese,” he said. “And I didn’t understand what it was we had done that caused us to be put behind barbed wire fences.”

Stephanie Hinnershitz, a historian at the National WWII Museum and the author of a book about the camps, told CNN the imprisonment emerged during a time of widespread prejudice against Japanese Americans and other people of Asian heritage. Immigrants were scapegoated, blamed for economic precarity and viewed as disloyal to the US, fueling legislation like the Alien Land Laws, which barred Chinese and Japanese immigrants from buying land in the US.

The West Coast was declared a theater of operations by the then-War Department, which offered commander John L. DeWitt “very broad authority to start issuing curfews, and to start ordering or calling for searches and seizures of homes, even where American citizens live,” Hinnershitz said.

In the crowded camp, separated from the rest of the country by miles of desert and armed soldiers, Tateishi remembers telling his brother he wanted to go to America one day.

“I had this very distinct sense that America was out there somewhere,” he said. “And I had this yearning to find out what it was like.”

In December 1944, with WWII drawing to an end, a Supreme Court ruling and a public proclamation paved the way for the camps to close. Japanese Americans were sent home with just a train ticket and $25 each.

After their release, former detainees faced financial strife and continued anti-Japanese racism, as well as the unremitting feeling they had been betrayed by the country to which they had worked so hard to assimilate.

Ina, whose US-born parents she said were “coerced” to renounce their citizenship in Tule Lake, leaving them stateless for more than a decade, said the ordeal devastated her family.

“We were never charged with a crime,” she added. “We never went through a court process, and yet everything was taken from us: our freedom, our belongings, our educational opportunities, our future, a generation of wealth.”

Today, the Trump administration’s hardline approach to immigration enforcement has seen activists with green cards locked up for months, masked federal agents grabbing people off the street, the shuttering of programs for refugees and asylum-seekers, and hundreds of workers arrested in chaotic workplace raids. Many people detained and deported have never been charged with a crime.

The president has defended his approach, saying the crackdown is “totally focused on criminals, really bad criminals.”

And the Supreme Court has upheld ICE officers’ ability to stop people for factors like their race, the language they speak, or their job. In one case captured on video, an agent told a man in a Minneapolis suburb he was being detained because of his accent.

Ina says she sees clear analogues to today, like the “criminalization by race and ethnicity,” the “forced removal from people’s homes,” and “the absence of due process,” that mirror her own experience. As Japanese American children were detained, so have immigrant children been locked up, some for months on end, in detention centers; some children, including US citizens, have been deported.

Another parallel is the “dehumanizing, racist” rhetoric used by the Trump administration to discuss immigrants, according to Elora Mukherjee, a leading immigration lawyer and professor at Columbia Law School.

The detention of people with green cards and other forms of legal status – as well as calls to denaturalize US citizens – also echoes the targeting of American citizens of Japanese descent, she said.

So too do the lengthy detentions some people experience in massive detention centers. “We never knew, were we going to be held for a month, a week?” Ina recalled. “Nobody dreamed they would be held for up to six years.”

Then there are the camps themselves. Thousands of immigrants are currently being detained in large detention centers where detainees, lawyers and activists have alleged abuse and poor conditions. The Department of Homeland Security has said that the facilities meet federal detention standards and undergo regular audits and inspections.

But the most striking similarity, Ina said, is the “dehumanization of people who are just looking for a better life.”

“There’s very little difference, except that those folks that are crossing the border to come over here are coming here in desperation, or survival,” she added. “Most of the Japanese American immigrants came here with hope.”

For both Tateishi and Ina, their childhood years in prison camps inspired a mission: To make sure no one else experiences what they did.

Tateishi found his path to activism in the 1970s, as anger swelled among young former detainees about their imprisonment, which the government had yet to acknowledge as an injustice. Working with the Japanese American Citizens League, he helped lead the movement to demand $20,000 per person for the years spent imprisoned because of their ethnicity, a goal brought to fruition with the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

The money was symbolic, he said. The real purpose of the campaign was to draw attention to the violation of Japanese Americans’ Constitutional rights.

Tateishi continued to fight for that commitment. In the midst of systematic racial profiling of Muslims and Arabs in the wake of 9/11, he and other activists with the Japanese American Citizens League used their own experiences to highlight the injustice.

Ina, meanwhile, cofounded Tsuru for Solidarity during Trump’s first term, a group she described as “a Japanese American social justice organization that is protesting the current unjust incarceration of immigrants, seeking asylum and protection in our country.”

They held protests outside detention centers where children were held, with traditional Japanese drumming and paper cranes – a bid to show them that people on the outside cared about them.

During the president’s second term, “there’s much more anxiety and fear,” among Tsuru members, she said. Elder members are scared about experiencing force from police at protests, or being arrested for protesting what they see as a repetition of an old injustice.

For younger Japanese Americans, many of them descendants of those incarcerated, the echoes of a traumatic family history resonate today.

“When I see immigrants today being ripped from their homes, grabbed from courthouses and being transferred in shackles to be incarcerated behind barbed wire, I see my grandparents, their parents and siblings and am motivated to take action,” said Becca Asaki, whose family was imprisoned during the war.

‘Stand up, show up, protest’

Tateishi urged people fighting the current wave of detentions and deportations to persevere. It took decades for Japanese American incarceration survivors to get a formal apology and reparations for their suffering, he noted.

“What’s important is people don’t give up,” he said.

He said his perspective “is shaped mightily by my experiences as a kid in these prisons and as someone who fought for so long for trying to make sure that we live up to our promises as a democracy, as a nation.”

Ina said in her work with other survivors of Japanese American prison camps, a recurring sentiment was “the pain they felt that nobody stood up for them.”

“There were no mass protests. There were no petitions,” she said. “There were individuals who helped out, but there was no outrage when we disappeared from the classrooms and our work and the farms and our neighborhoods.”

That silence, she said, is part of the trauma.

It is also what compels her now.

“Today, it’s really important for us especially, but for everybody, to stand up, show up, protest,” she said.

Her hope has come true in some ways: Trump’s second term has been marked by rallies against ICE across the country. Most recently, two fatal shootings by immigration officers last month sparked massive demonstrations in Minneapolis, where an aggressive immigration enforcement campaign brought thousands of federal agents.

“We will not be silent,” Ina said. “We will not turn our backs on this repetition of our history and the lifelong legacy of trauma that continues to haunt us today.”