Most Americans today are well aware that, during World War II, the U.S. government imprisoned Japanese Americans, including U.S. citizens, in internment camps on no other evidence than the fact of their heritage. They know of the wartime hysteria that cloaked the government’s logic, and the racism and xenophobia Japanese Americans faced. But one chapter of this history has remained much more hidden, much less acknowledged by public officials: The United States simultaneously ran a parallel internment system that confined some 2,200 Latin Americans of Japanese descent, kidnapping individuals from countries such as Peru, Bolivia and Colombia — whose political leaders were in on the plot — and confining them on U.S. soil.
Most Americans also probably think the Japanese internment chapter was closed decades ago, when the U.S. government approved the largest reparations program it has ever enacted: the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, a historic law that gave $20,000 and a formal apology to victims of Japanese internment who were U.S. citizens or permanent residents. But as the country praised itself for righting that historical wrong, it excluded those it had kidnapped from abroad. Although many of them were exiled to Japan after the war, the Japanese Latin Americans who remained in the United States were ineligible for the reparations program. They later received some compensation through a court settlement, but the sum was so much lower and the apology so formulaic that some decided not to accept.
While the United States government has admitted to the Japanese Latin American internment program, the dwindling group of living victims and their descendants — including Shibayama’s daughter, Bekki — are still pushing for full compensation and recognition. And they argue the responsibility for addressing this moral debt now falls squarely on the shoulders of President Joe Biden and his administration. Their prospects might have looked better at a time of growing support for reparations and with a president who has pledged to defend human rights, as well as a Cabinet member who once vocally supported their cause. Yet, so far, the White House has been mostly silent, seeming to ignore requests for information or meetings from high-level international officials and the victims’ families.
Shibayama died in 2018, in San Jose, Calif., after decades living in America as a farmworker, an undocumented immigrant, an Army draftee and, since 1970, a U.S. citizen. But two years after his death, OAS’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights released a report declaring that the United States had violated his right to equality under the law when it excluded him, as well as his brothers, from the 1988 reparations program. Moreover, IACHR found that Japanese Latin Americans “fell into a sort of legal no-man’s-land” when they were released as undocumented immigrants, a distinction that led to “wild inequalities.” The report made two recommendations to the United States: reparations, including monetary compensation, as well as “full disclosure” of any information the U.S. government had relating to the internment of Japanese Latin Americans.