Unlike the 120,000 American citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry in the U.S. who were detained in internment camps run by the War Relocation Authority, the Latin Americans were detained in facilities run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. They were largely hidden from the public and the press.

An estimated 3,000 Latin Americans of Japanese, German and Italian ancestry passed through the Crystal City internment camp for families. A 1945 propaganda film produced by the U.S. Department of Justice shows hundreds of cabins laid out across dirt roads and enclosed in high fences with watch towers for armed guards.

Yamamoto was seven when she arrived and would spend the next four years there.

Immigrant Families Detained Today

In January of this year, I traveled to the same part of Texas to report on a new wave of families in detention: thousands of mothers and children seeking refuge from violence in Central America who were taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and placed in a privately-run prison, just 45 miles from Crystal City, in a town called Dilley.

Since the facility opened in 2015, the population has fluctuated from a few hundred people up to 2400.

ICE denied my requests to visit the South Texas Family Residential Center, so I asked an immigrant advocate who had worked inside it to drive me to the highway entrance. From there at a distance you can see a large tented area, where immigrant rights advocate Katy Murdza believes people are processed in.

“You can just see the tops of the light posts,” Murdza observed. “There's flood lighting at night, so people say it's even hard to sleep because it's never truly night.”

Those flood lights are so bright you can see them from a mile away.

The Crystal City camp was also surrounded by barbed wire fences and flood lights.

Not anymore.

When our buses arrive, all that’s visible on the now barren field is a water tower and the cement base of a reservoir that the detainees converted into a swimming pool to escape the scorching Texas summers.

Two girls drowned in that pool — one of them was Yamamoto's good friend.

Yamamoto and the other pilgrims gather inside the base of the swimming pool for a ceremony to honor the girls and 15 other people who died at the camp.

Buddhist minister Ron Kobata of San Francisco asks participants to offer incense and white carnations at an altar for their predecessors, “who endured this experience, but not with just pity and resentment, but with determination, so that their offspring will not have to endure that same tragedy.”

Yamamoto and other pilgrims participate in the ritual.

Later, they say that a very similar tragedy is unfolding again — for migrant families coming to the U.S. to seek asylum.

The day after their visit to Crystal City, they participate in a rally in San Antonio with local immigrant advocates. Yamamoto is invited to speak.

“Lately when I hear the immigrants getting separated by children and parents, I feel so bad for them!” she tells the crowd of a couple hundred people. She says it brings back the painful memories of her own childhood separation.

“When my father was kidnapped in January of 1943 and we said goodbye to him, not knowing where he was being taken, and when we ever will see him again,” she says. “It was a very traumatic day for me.”

Murdza, the advocate who took me to the family detention center in Dilley earlier this year, also speaks at the rally. She works for an organization that provides legal help to families to get them released from detention to await their hearings in immigration court.

“Detention harms the physical health, mental health and legal rights of the families,” she tells the former internees.

“The government calls this facility the South Texas Family Residential Center,” Murdza says. “But those of us who know its effects on the mothers and children detained there know that it's a jail.”

Starting Over in the United States

After about eight months of separation, Yamamoto was finally reunited with her father in Crystal City.

Then the parents learned that the U.S. wanted to deport them to Japan — a place that Yamamoto and her siblings had never been. But the day they were set to sail, Yamamoto’s father became too ill to travel. His health had deteriorated in detention.

A full two years after the war ended, the family was still being held at Crystal City. Finally, an attorney with the ACLU of Northern California arranged for their release to an aunt in Berkeley who agreed to sponsor them. Yamamoto remembers taking the train to the now defunct Santa Fe station at Acton Street and University Avenue.

“A Japanese minister came to pick us up,” she recalled. “He drove up University and all the neon lights were shining. Wow! We were just amazed at all those beautiful lights.”

Yamamoto’s parents lost all their property in Peru, and Peruvian officials would not allow the family to return. She says her parents worked menial jobs in California for the rest of their lives.

For more than a decade after their release, the government continued to consider them "illegal aliens” subject to deportation. Then in 1954, a change in U.S. immigration law allowed the family to become legal permanent residents.

Finally, in 1998, Japanese Latin Americans won a historic settlement of $5,000 for each surviving detainee or their family, and a letter of apology signed by President Bill Clinton.

While many survivors found the offer meager, they thought it was important that the U.S. government officially acknowledged that it had violated their rights.

“We recognize the wrongs of the past and offer our profound regret to those who endured such grave injustice,” the letter stated. “We understand that our nation’s actions were rooted in racial prejudice and wartime hysteria.”

Yamamoto says she’s praying that President Trump will soon realize that his policies on immigrant families are wrong and that children are paying the price.