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TI: Which I want to pivot to, because another way in terms of learning about the story, knowing the story, is connecting the story to what's happening to maybe another community. And so you're involved with something right now that I find very powerful, and why don't you explain, it has to do with the family detention centers on the southern border. So why don't you talk about that?

SI: Yeah, and I think that this is... you know, I'll be seventy-five shortly, and I feel like this is kind of the culminating process of really feeling passionate about paying attention to what's going on in the rest of the world, and speaking out, and protesting in ways that, one, our parents couldn't do, and two, in ways that people never did for us. And that muffled silence, I think, is part of what has constrained us, and so there is, I think, a combination with the young millennials now who are more free to protest and speak out and organize, use social media and get the word out. We're working together. So one of my favorite stories is how this started was a fourth generation Japanese American's grandfather was at Tule Lake, called me and he's a lawyer for the ACLU National Prison Project.

TI: And you're talking about Carl.

SI: Carl Takei. And he said, he asked me if I would come to Texas and go inside these detention facilities, because the ACLU wants to get some sense of the trauma that the children are being exposed to, and would I come and do that? And I said, "Okay, when's the next flight?" [Laughs] Because I thought, wow, what a gift, to be able to do that. So he organized and made it possible with a couple of local organizations that were doing volunteer work, and I was to slip in with these folks as a volunteer, and I got to interview several of these mothers and their children. And so I saw firsthand many -- and listened to many -- disturbing stories. So from that experience, and writing about it and getting the reaction from people, and more and more people recognizing the resonance between children who are being separated from their parents and children who are being incarcerated, families held, innocent people, the same rhetoric of the threat of national security with no proof or evidence of that. Criminalizing innocent people seeking asylum, is a legal action, but they're being treated like criminals, handcuffed and put inside of prisons. These are not "family residential facilities" like they called Crystal City a "family internment camp," those were prisons, both of them.

And so at one of the events in Texas, they asked me to speak at a protest march in front of the detention facility, and it struck me that forty miles on the same road is the Crystal City internment camp where I was held with my mother and brother while my father was in a separate prison. So Grassroots Leadership is the organization that organized this protest, and they had a camera guy there, and he asked me, "Do you want to go there?" So we went there and... it was so, I don't know, disturbing and chilling.

TI: So this was the first time you had, since you had returned?

SI: Yeah, I had never been to Crystal City before. And I didn't even plan it as I was speaking, I was just pointing.

TI: And you just sort of knew that it was down the road?

SI: Right, right. So I said, "Let's go." So we left the march and we drove down there, and so, in the past several months, this horrific separation of children from their families who were crossing the border seeking asylum, and I had all these visual images of the stories that these women told me about what it took for them to get to the border, and how they were told that when you got to the border and you saw the men with the hats, the border patrol hats, "Just put your hand out like that and say, 'Asylum,' and they'll take care of you." And these women told me stories about being cuffed and thrown into these cement rooms with the temperature turned down, and their babies, some of these were nursing mothers, some of them with toddlers, some of them... if the boy was eight years old or older, separated and put in the men's unit. And they were being held for months back then.

So after the Tule Lake pilgrimage last year, I met Mike Ishii and some other Yonseis, who had kind of the gusto, the outrage, so we started talking about needing to really show up as Japanese Americans, because we have the moral authority to protest what is so resonant for us, and not just talk about it, but to really show up. And so there was a Crystal City pilgrimage committee with some Japanese Peruvians who were held at Crystal City, and some of us who were children at Crystal City and others, and we decided we would have a pilgrimage to Crystal City and then, on the bus, go to Dilley, Texas, where this South Texas Family Residential Center is now holding mothers and children, but more recently, we just learned, confined with infants.

TI: And what would you call this? Because I know the government uses lots of euphemisms historically.

SI: It's a prison.

TI: Like a prison for babies, or a prison for...

SI: A prison for families. Yeah, and early on, there were cribs in some of these detention facilities inside the jail. And so when I got to go in, I mean, these are prisons. They're prison cells, electronic gates, security guards with guns in their holsters, this is not a "family residential center."

So we decided we would start out small, and we would rent one bus and there's fifty-five seats in a bus, so it would be fifty-five people. But this thing has exploded, thanks to social media, and these young Yonseis who know how to work social media and get the word out. And then I contacted all those people that I had made connections, local ACLU, national ACLU. National ACLU donated $1,300 to help pay for some aspect of the trip, and lots of time and effort. So Grassroots Leadership and ACLU will be there to set up the canopies and chairs for the elders, because there is a Japanese Peruvian woman in her nineties that's going to be coming.

TI: And how soon is this?

SI: This is happening at the end of the month, March 29th.

TI: Okay, so we're literally two weeks away.

SI: Two weeks away. And NHK World from Japan is flying in to be with us, I've talked to journalists from the Smithsonian Magazine and National Geographic Magazine, ACLU is doing outreach to get the press there. We want it to be an event that will point out that this is a repetition of what has happened and talk about the long term consequences of children being held in prisons. And part of that is we want it to be a Japanese American statement. So we have called on taiko drummers to bring what they can on the airplane, so they're bringing their drums from Denver, maybe someone from Seattle that's coming.

TI: We have a staff member who is coming.

SI: Yeah, right.

TI: I'm thinking also, as this sort of evolves, are there going to be caravans of people going?

SI: Yes. So we have our bus of elders, but also now...

TI: No, but like from California or different places, people driving?

SI: I don't know if they're driving, but they are going to show up at the protest. And local people and state people are going to be showing up. And the Cranes for Solidarity project, so the barbed wire fence is right along the highway. So the demonstration will be on the highway, but we want the children who are in the facility, the children and the families, to be able to hear us and see us. So we want to string ten thousand cranes along the fence -- I get kind of choked up when I think about this -- because, you know, the symbol of the wings and how they're trapped, and we want them to see the colorfulness, they won't be able to get very close to us, and to hear the drums beating, so they'll know. Because I think about how people turned away from us when we were emptying the classrooms and not showing up for our jobs, and neighbors seeing empty houses and farms being left behind, and nobody marched for us, nobody protested in ways that even us as a small community, we can do. And the best part of it is the Grassroots Leadership, who helps bring pro bono young attorneys to go into the detention facilities to help the mothers prepare for their immigration judge, prove that they have credible fear that if they get deported, terrible things will happen to them. And so he said he will make sure all the attorneys that are going in will tell all of their clients, and the word will get passed on, that, "At two o'clock on March 30th, listen for the drums, and if you can get a peek out the window, see the colorful birds that are being strung on the fence." And I just came back from Japan and I gave a talk, and at the end of the talk, like three hours later when they were thanking me, they presented me with a bag of folded cranes that people had folded just in that short time, wanting me to bring it to hang on the fence from Japan.

TI: And you get the power of you, because -- now I get choked up thinking about this -- but in cities all around the country, people are folding cranes.

SI: They're folding cranes, it's so amazing, yes.

TI: It's such a powerful thing. And as I hear your story and this interview, it's a way for the community to get back some of its power.

SI: Yes, right. And then people are connecting with each other across the country in ways we haven't before, and we have Mike Ishii in New York, and Nancy Ukai, the Omori sisters, we have all of these people who have been activists, but we are connecting in ways that, the time is so ripe with these young millennials who can articulate. And it's interesting, when I think about the generational differences, like we started out thinking, "Okay, we'll have this small bus, we'll go and we'll carry a sign, and maybe it'll be a vigil." But now, it's a full-on protest. It's going to be loud and it's going to be covered by the media. And some of us are going to go down to the border at Laredo, we want to just see what's happening there, that's the closest border place. And an NHK crew wants to come with us and film. And then the pilgrimage protest ends on Sunday, but a large number of us are actually driving up to Austin because Bob Libal from Grassroots Leadership has organized meetings for us to meet with legislators and their representatives. And we want to tell them our story, we want to warn them about what's happening, we want to demand that they do something to bring these prisons down. These are private prisons, corporations that are making billions of dollars every year, and we don't like it. [Laughs]

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