In mid-June, New York Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ignited a debate about the nature of the detention camps at the U.S. border. "The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border,” she said on Instagram Live. “And that is exactly what they are—they are concentration camps."

That prompted pushback from public figures like Republican Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney and Meet the Press news anchor Chuck Todd, who both conflated concentration camps in general with Nazi death camps specifically. In turn, more commentators weighed in on the subject. Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, argued that the situation at the border does fit in the history of concentration camps. And actor and activist George Takei, whose family was incarcerated in the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II, tweeted, “I know what concentration camps are. I was inside two of them, in America. And yes, we are operating such camps again.”

In 1942, Takei, then 5 years old, and his family were ordered out of their Los Angeles home at gunpoint by two U.S. soldiers, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, issued ten weeks after the Japanese Imperial Navy bombed Pearl Harbor. Along with 120,000 other Japanese-Americans, Takei’s family was incarcerated in American military concentration camps, euphemistically called “internment camps,” without any criminal charges, for the duration of the war. Four decades later, the American government issued a formal apology for the civil rights violation, acknowledging it was driven by "racial prejudice, war hysteria and the failure of political leadership."

And as conditions of the detention centers at the U.S. border have come to light, comparisons to the Japanese-American concentration camps have taken hold—survivors of the camps have protested the migrant detention camps, particularly Fort Sill in Oklahoma, which was previously a smaller site for the detention of Japanese-Americans and Native Americans at different points. Takei was incarcerated at the same concentration camp, Rohwer in Arkansas, where my late grandparents, Hiroshi and Grayce Uyehara, and their families were also held. So I called him to talk about his experience in internment camps, the cultural parallels to today’s detention centers, and why he has hope for a better America. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

GQ: There's been some debate about whether the detention camps at the U.S.-Mexico border are concentration camps or not. You tweeted that your family was held in two concentration camps in the U.S., and the government is operating them again. Could you expand on that?

George Takei: The camps that we were in were concentration camps. If you look the word up in the dictionary, the dictionary definition is the concentration of people of a common heritage, race, or faith for political purposes. Some were immigrants, but we were Americans born here. My mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was a San Franciscan. They met and married, and my brother and sister and I were born in Los Angeles. We were Americans. But suddenly, because we happened to look like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor, we were concentrated together with other Japanese-Americans from up and down the West Coast: 120,000 of us in barb-wire prison camps guarded over by the U.S. military in sentry towers with guns aimed at us. That was a concentration camp.

Japanese-Americans were in concentration camps. The children being torn away from Latinos fleeing violence and poverty are in concentration camps. The Jewish people concentrated by the Nazis were in death camps or extermination camps. So we need to recognize each for what it is, and each are grotesque horrors inflicted on other human beings.