Rewriting History

Floor Speech

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Ms. MATSUI. Mr. Speaker, I rise today because history is not just being forgotten, it is being erased.

In 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, approving the removal of American citizens of Japanese descent to remote camps. My parents and grandparents were among the 120,000 forced to leave their homes and their businesses.

They were sent by their own government, our government, to a camp in Poston, Arizona. They lived in appalling conditions, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, solely because of who they were.

I was born in that internment camp, and that history lives with me every day. It drives me to fight for my neighbors, for their rights, for their dignity because that injustice didn't begin with barbed wire and armed soldiers. It began with fear, with racist, incendiary rhetoric, and with leaders who decided unjustly to single out an entire community as a threat.

That is why the National Park Service's decision to remove references to the incarceration of Japanese Americans, along with other hard truths about our history, is not benign. It is deeply reckless.

History is not just something we remember. It is something that teaches. When we strip away the truth, we strip away all the warnings that go along with it.

In fact, during World War II, Fort Bliss in Texas was used as a detention center for Japanese Americans. Today, you don't see a sign. You see another active detention center.

This administration is detaining children on the same ground used to unjustly hold people during one of our country's darkest chapters. We are, once again, seeing people singled out because of who they are.

ICE is ripping families apart. Innocent people are being hurt. Children are being detained. Again, we hear incendiary rhetoric at the highest levels of power, language that dehumanizes, that scapegoats, that tells people who to fear, and who to blame.

We have been down that road before. When fear is normalized, when lies are repeated, injustice is excused, and when history is erased, it becomes easier to repeat it.

Our national parks are not just places of beauty. They are public classrooms. They carry the responsibility to tell the full American story, especially the parts that expose how fragile our freedoms truly are.

That is why I have fought to expand and protect the Japanese American Confinement Sites grant program to make sure that these places are preserved and accessible, not hidden, not sanitized, not erased. Because civil liberties are not self-sustaining. Democracy is not self- fulfilling. We must work at it.

History does not protect us unless we are willing to tell it. I believe that this is a great and wonderful country, but that promise only survives if we confront our past honestly and refuse to let fear write our future.

Mr. Speaker, I will not be silent about our past. I will not stop fighting for our future.

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