When the charter bus rolled to a stop Saturday afternoon outside the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Satsuki Ina felt a kinship with mothers and children in the facility, seeking asylum in the U.S. As a survivor of the World War II Crystal City Family Internment Camp, Ina said she understood what it meant to be locked up and for children to be traumatized.

In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which said Americans of Japanese descent living in West Coast cities would be relocated to internment camps until the end of World War II. Ina was a 2-year-old when she arrived with her family at the small town.

Ina recalled how Japanese-Americans disappeared from jobs and classrooms without any outrage from neighbors.

“Nobody stood up for us,” Ina said. “We had never committed a crime except to have the face of the enemy. But I feel empowered today that we can use our voices, voices that we didn’t have then to speak out against injustice and inhumane treatment of innocent human beings.”

Ina was one of six internment survivors who traveled from across the country for a pilgrimage from Crystal City to the detention center, where more than 1,000 women and children are being detained. The group was among more than 100 protesters who crowded along the barbed-wire fence with one message: Stop repeating history.

The Crystal City Pilgrimage Committee, Grassroots Leadership and Crystal City Independent School District sponsored the event.

From 1942 to 1948, the Crystal City Internment Camp was one of three government camps in Texas that detained U.S. citizens of Japanese descent. At the height of World War II, about 4,000 Japanese-Americans, Italians and Germans were interned at Crystal City. A total of 120,000 Japanese-Americans were interned at camps operated by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Before the protesters arrived at the center, Buddhist and Christian leaders led them in a memorial service at the remnants of the camp’s swimming pool. Descendants of internment camp detainees and supporters surrounded Ina and her five fellow survivors as chimes and chants rang out across the cracked, concrete slabs that were once the shallow end of the pool.

The members of One World Taiko beat large drums, sending booming rhythms across land where “Victory Huts” and guard towers once stood.

The Rev. Ronald Kobata said that though they were not welcome, they were willing to be welcoming to strangers.

“Instead of being filled with hate,” he said to the survivors, “you are filled with compassion for others.”

Koz Naganuma one of the six survivors sitting in the front row, was 20 months old when he arrived at the camp, after his family was forced to leave Peru at gunpoint. They came by way of a cargo ship through the Panama Canal and a train from New Orleans to Crystal City. When Japanese internees greeted his mother at the camp, she thought they had been taken to Japan.

Naganuma said it is important to continue getting the word out about what is happening in border towns and detention camps.

“It’s unthinkable at this day and age,” he said, that over 75 years later “this is still happening.”

Across the two-lane road outside the center, the protesters hung thousands of hand-folded paper cranes on the fence. Supporters from Japanese communities across the country made the colorful cranes, considered the Japanese symbol of healing, hope and peace.

Ross Juricek, 36, stood in a scrum of photographers near the edge of the asphalt road, with his wife, Ashley, and their 6-year-old daughter, Elliot. The youngster clapped when the speakers on the bluff urged the crowd to raise their voices so the families in the center could hear their support.

“Families and children take heart,” the Rev. Kobata said. “We have not forgotten you.”

Vincent T. Davis is a reporter in the Greater San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | vtdavis@express-news.net | Twitter: @vincentdavis