Rewriting History

Floor Speech

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Mr. TAKANO. Mr. Speaker, our country's history is complicated. Our country's history is at times uncomfortable to confront. That does not make it divisive or offensive to preserve and to learn from.

Japanese incarceration during World War II stands as one of those uncomfortable chapters that Trump and his administration are attempting to erase. More than 125,000 Japanese Americans, including my parents and grandparents, were rounded up and placed in desolate camps at the hands of their own government.

There are dozens of these camps memorialized around the country for people to visit and honor these experiences. At the Manzanar National Historic Site in California, content is now being censored because the words on the plaque there make this administration uncomfortable.

As the saying goes, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

This administration wants us to forget that our government is capable of rounding up entire families and upending their lives, as they did to my family, without any due process. They want us to forget the past while they perpetuate yet another legacy-defining human and civil rights abuse on a national scale.

Will Americans generations from now visit alligator Alcatraz and think to themselves: How could our government do this? How could our leaders do this?

Will students on school trips one day walk through cages behind razor wire, trying to comprehend the brutality that took place there?

More importantly, these future generations of Americans will look to us, the Congress, to see what we did to try to stop it.

We cannot stop it alone. We need Republicans like you, Mr. Speaker, to join us. Think of our future. Think of how history will remember this government you are a part of: executions of Americans on our streets, demanding papers from Americans to prove that they belong, and mass Federal agents acting with impunity.

One day, everyone will say that we were against this. One day, they will say that you should have been against this, that we should have been against this.

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