Thousands of paper cranes surround a migrant family jail in Dilley, Texas.

Six Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in U.S. internment camps during World War II were among more than 100 demonstrators who staged a peaceful protest outside a migrant family jail in Dilley, Texas, over the weekend, the San Antonio Express-News reports. The group, organized by the Crystal City Pilgrimage Committee, Grassroots Leadership, and Crystal City Independent School District, “crowded along the barbed-wire fence with one message: Stop repeating history.”

Children do not belong in detention, period, yet the South Texas Family Residential Center has jailed babies as young as 5 months old. Currently, it jails more than 1,000 women and kids, and is just under an hour away the former site of the Crystal City Family Internment Camp, where Dr. Satsuki Ina was imprisoned as a child. She was at Dilley on Saturday, she said, “because nobody stood up for us.”

“We had never committed a crime except to have the face of the enemy,” she said. “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.” At Dilley, the group of demonstrators hung thousands of paper cranes, lovingly hand-folded by Americans all across the country, on the fence surrounding the facility.

“The story of the crane as symbol of nonviolence and human love is a uniquely Japanese cultural story,” Mike Ishii of the New York Day of Remembrance told NBC News, “and we want to bring it to this struggle.” Advocates plan to take the cranes to other protests across the U.S., but their first stop carries additional significance. “There is a deep sense of outrage that mass incarcerations are happening again in the United States,” Ishii said, “and we intend to be the allies that we needed during WWII.”