Densho Digital Repository - Aaron Zajic Interview (Densho ID: ddr-densho-1020-1-3)

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EK: So I'm trying to get a sense of, kind of, the size of the operation. You said at one point you were a team leader, so how many teams would you say there were and how many people were on each team?

AZ: So the process... there was stage 1, I guess, I think we called it stage 1 or stage 2. I hope I'm not contradicting what others have said. But the mail would come in and certain research would be done in stage 1 just to totally verify that that person is the same person that we have historical records for. Once the historical research was done, and I believe that was the stage 1 team... are you nodding because that's right?

EK: Yeah.

AZ: Good. Then stage 2 would be my more administrative staff, I guess, and we were just making sure that now that we've identified that this is the same person, have they given us the right information? That they're still alive, because again, a lot of this unfortunately took so long for the bill to be signed and people were old, we needed to make sure that they were still alive, we need to make sure that it wasn't fraud, and that it was the right person, and that we had the specific documents on our checklist that we needed to make sure that we had proven that name changes, a lot of folks, if they were in the internment center, internment camps, and they were, got married afterwards, I needed a marriage certificate. And some people didn't have marriage certificates, so sometimes we had to work with our Special Verifications Unit to find some way to get witnesses or something just to show that there was a legal name change.

EK: So as the program progressed, how did your role change, if it did at all?

AZ: Well, as the program progressed, I was more of the team lead for the stage 2 analysts. As we got through the three, I guess it was two or three main... I guess it was three main payment sections over a certain amount of years, and it was just a humongous rush to get twenty-five or twenty thousand per year. Once we got through that, that was the majority of the folks. I don't remember exactly how many folks were determined eligible and given the formal letter of apology and payment, but I think it was, was it twenty-five thousand per year?

EK: I don't remember, but I know it was based on the congressional allocation for that year.

AZ: So once we got through the first three years, whether it was sixty or seventy-five thousand, most of the people had already been paid, most of the people that would have been clearly eligible. There was a lot of legal issues that came out, mainly people that were in certain areas that weren't interned but were definitely restricted in their movements. But I couldn't, we didn't have, for the main team 1 and team 2 verification, we couldn't do that. We just could compare them to records of folks that were actually interned. So it kind of trickled down. So as the office was winding down, we started working on other cases in the Civil Rights Division because the Office of Redress Administration was part of the Civil Rights Division. So we kind of morphed into a litigation support unit, so we were working on redress, but we didn't have enough redress work to keep us all busy full time. So all of the staff started working on employment discrimination cases, housing discrimination cases. And eventually, as redress completely wound down, we were only maybe working one percent of our time on redress. And even, so I've been in Health and Human Services now for about three years. Even three years ago I was still having some redress responsibilities. Folks that did get the formal apology and the twenty thousand dollars, the twenty thousand dollars had, there were certain, I guess it was tax exempt, and there were certain other exemptions. So now they were getting folks all along that would want verification of payment to prove that the money that they were having was, it didn't count, I think, as regular earnings. I'm not an attorney, I don't remember exactly what the legal jargon would be. But that money, if you went into a state or federal senior living community where they would take all your assets, that, I think, was exempt from that. So we were still forming those -- and still today, I talked to, earlier today, one of my colleges, Jay Kim, who still gets one or two a month, folks asking for proof of payment, so they could prove that the money that they have came through this program.