For the first four years of his life, all Hiroshi Shimizu knew was imprisonment.
After Pearl Harbor, law enforcement arrested his mother and father because they happened to be of Japanese descent, and he was born a U.S. citizen in a concentration camp in Central Utah. The family bounced from camp to camp, including California’s notorious Tule Lake, before being sent to San Antonio by train, stopping at the domed station west of downtown that now houses VIA’s headquarters.
There, the Shimizus were put on a bus to the largest family concentration camp in the U.S.
Officially called the Crystal City Enemy Detention Facility, the camp located in scrubland an hour and a half southwest of San Antonio concentrated families of Japanese, German and Italian descent from 1942 to 1948. The detention site had its own schools, sports fields and even a swimming pool.
Today, another detention site has opened in a nearby South Texas town, and like the Crystal City facility, it’s specifically designed to hold families and has been described by government officials as being humane. Like Crystal City, it’s also located on the site of a former migrant labor camp.
Officially called the Dilley Immigration Processing Facility — formerly the South Texas Family Residential Center — the new camp also is replete with schools, sports fields and a playground. It concentrates migrant families, both recent arrivals and longtime residents, in a complex of white tents and trailers in the South Texas community of Dilley, a short bus ride from Crystal City and just an hour’s drive from the Alamo City.
With the Trump administration undertaking the most severe anti-immigrant crackdown in decades and human rights advocates raising concerns about the dangers of immigrant lockups like the one in Dilley, survivors of the Crystal City camp are reliving what they thought they’d left in the past.
“The parallels are really horrifying,” said Shimizu, now 82. “It does conjure up the experience we had.”
‘You can’t just walk out’
Shimizu’s memories of Crystal City are a little rosier than those from Tule Lake, where he and his immediate family were forcibly and permanently separated from their grandfather, who attempted suicide after learning of their imminent departure.
“Being older, I was allowed to run around with kids my age, and so I had those kinds of rich experiences,” Shimizu said. “And then we had a swimming pool. And I actually remember going into that pool … . I really hesitate to say it was, you know, a good experience, but it was better than what I came from.”
Even so, Shimizu rejected the rosy portraits of historical revisionists such as right-wing author Lillian Baker, who compared World War II-era internment sites to summer camps.
“You can’t get out, you’re in prison,” he said. “You can’t just walk out.”
The experience left enough of a mark on Shimizu that he serves on the board of the Crystal City Pilgrimage Committee, which organizes an annual gathering of survivors of the detention site for a weekend of remembrance, healing and activism.
“After all these decades, you can tell some of your newer friends about it, and most of them cannot imagine that it took place,” said Kazumu Julio Cesar Naganuma, 83, another Crystal City survivor who works to organize the annual pilgrimage.
Now a U.S. citizen, Nagunuma was born in Callao, Peru, the youngest of eight children. One day in 1944, FBI agents showed up at the laundry business owned by his father, who’d lived in Peru for 20 years.
The family was swept up as part of a nameless prisoner-exchange program facilitated by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the predecessor to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The program — little known to this day — disappeared thousands of Latin American civilians of Japanese, Italian and German descent to camps in the U.S. — including Crystal City and the Enemy Alien Detention Station at Fort Sam Houston — so they could be swapped for American POWs held abroad.
Another of those disappeared to Crystal City was an El Salvadoran man named Friedrich Walter Schlösser. In another eerie parallel to current times, Schlösser wrote in his 1942 diary that El Salvador’s then-president stated he could instead “build the best concentration camp in Central America” with money the U.S. charged for people it abducted under the prisoner-exchange program.
Naganuma’s father was given three days to pack up his life in Peru. Forced onto a U.S.-bound ship, the family endured filthy, sickening and crowded conditions. Before landing in New Orleans, U.S. officials confiscated the family’s Peruvian passports so they would land as “undocumented aliens” whom the government could disappear as they saw fit.
In New Orleans, the Naganumas were forced to strip naked, then sprayed with the insecticide DDT. Then they were sent to Crystal City, where they suffered bouts of tuberculosis. After the war, the family was able to avoid “deportation” to Japan, a country where Naganuma had never been, and settled in San Francisco.
Historical revisionists can whitewash the experience of being kidnapped from one’s home and taken to a camp, Naganuma said, because they never had to endure the painful experience.
“In my father’s case, you know, he made a wonderful living for a couple decades, and he had seven children. And for everything, for his whole livelihood to be taken away and to board a ship … and to do that all within three days after you lived there for decades,” Naganuma said.
“You lost so much, your job, your property, everything you’ve worked so hard for. So, I think that part of it, these people that are talking about it being a summer camp, they need to put themselves in that position … . Only if they were taken and kidnapped that way would they kind of understand.”
Through their work with the Crystal City Pilgrimage Committee, Shimizu and Naganuma will help organize this year’s Crystal City Pilgrimage, scheduled for Oct. 9-12 alongside the city’s annual Spinach Festival.
The pilgrimage will include visits to Crystal City’s newly renovated My Story Museum along with remnants of the camp: a scattering of slabs, flagpoles and an empty swimming pool in a scrubby field behind a Crystal City ISD complex.
The weekend also will feature panel discussions on the solidarity between Crystal City’s survivors and Chicano rights activists and on the White House’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to disappear Venezuelan nationals, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to camps in El Salvador today.
As they did during the first Trump administration, attendees also plan to protest the president’s mass-deportation agenda.
In 2019, Shimizu and Naganuma joined Crystal City survivors and Japanese American advocacy group Tsuru for Solidarity in a demonstration in front of the Dilley camp. The protest included taiko drummers, 30,000 origami cranes and a large blue banner reading “No more U.S. concentration camps.”
“For the Pilgrimage coming up in October, we’re planning some sort of rally to support families and protest against breaking up families and incarcerating them — the kids separately from their parents,” Shimizu said. “Which is a step or two beyond what they did to us.”
Those who wish to join the pilgrimage can register on the organization’s website. Registration closes Aug. 9.
Business as usual in Dilley
At a late-May special meeting of the Dilley City Council inside the town’s sleek, clean city hall, a gold-fringed American flag hung behind the dais, topped by an eagle with outstretched wings.
Dilley Immigration Processing Facility administrator Jose Rodriguez Jr. sat in the front row. He wore a lanyard identifying him as an employee of CoreCivic, the private prison company operating the camp. Recently hired assistant camp administrator Jeffrey Fikes sat beside him wearing a U.S. Army lanyard.
After council moved to discuss a memorandum of understanding between the Dilley Police Department and CoreCivic, Rodriguez took to the lectern and provided an update on camp operations.
He opened with the numbers. As of May 20, 180 people were held in the site’s only open-housing unit — “31 adult males, 53 adult females, 96 children” and “60 family units.” The company plans to open all five housing units by Nov. 5, he added, bringing the camp to its total capacity of 2,400 people.
That increase will come exactly one year after Trump’s election to a second term.
The administrator also discussed the glut of applications for job postings at the detention facility, among them mental health counselor, chaplain and various nursing positions. He went on at length about the amenities provided to imprisoned families, including the one pantry, one phone room, single fridge and two microwaves to be shared by the 480 people in each housing unit.
Then Rodriguez described the recent Cinco de Mayo and Mother’s Day activities held inside.
“The kids actually prepared Mother’s Day cards and did a little bit of finger painting,” he said. “We try to celebrate all the holidays with the residents and just try to take their minds away from the environment they’re in, even though it’s, you know, not a bad environment, their situation. So, yes, we look forward to Father’s Day coming up in June, so we’ll have some activities planned.”
Left unmentioned during Rodriguez’s address to Dilley City Council was the death of 21-month-old Mariee Juárez inside the camp.
On May 10, 2018, three days before Mother’s Day, six weeks after being packed into a room in the facility with other sick children, Juárez died of a respiratory illness. Her mother Yazmin Juárez later testified before Congress that all she had with her after she left the hospital following her daughter’s death was a piece of paper painted with Mariee’s handprints, which nurses made as a Mother’s Day gift.
“If ICE’s detention center had just been safe and sanitary — and if they’d given my daughter the proper medical care she needed — Mariee might still be here today, preparing to celebrate her third birthday in August,” Yazmin Juárez told Congress in 2019, NPR reports.
After rubber-stamping an agreement letting Dilley police enter the CoreCivic camp to conduct criminal investigations, council then moved onto other business, such as awarding bids for the operation of a pool concession stand and deciding which band would play first in the city’s Fourth of July Festival.
Emailed for comment on recent reports of inhumane conditions in the Dilley lockup, CoreCivic spokesman Ryan Gustin deferred questions to ICE. In turn, ICE officials deferred to the Department of Homeland Security, which didn’t reply to the Current’s inquiries.
More camps coming
Following the meeting, Dilley City Administrator Henry Arredondo told the Current he expected CoreCivic’s facility to benefit the town economically.
“It employs a lot of local people,” Arredondo said. “They’re, you know, good-paying wages, up to U.S. standards with benefits and health insurance. Those are hard to come by.”
When asked whether he expects out-of-towners, including survivors of the Dilley camp, to reconvene in town 80 years from now, just as those who endured the Crystal City detention site do today, Arredondo hesitated.
“I can’t — I don’t know, because we’re over here in South Texas, and there’s always been immigration, you know, coming and going through here,” he said.
When asked whether he’d be open to visiting the site of the Crystal City camp, Arredondo said he’d consider it.
“I like history,” he said. “It’s important to have open communication, and a lot of respect. Because at the end of the day, we’re all human beings. We all have common goals … provide safety for our families, all that kind of stuff.”
Around the time of Dilley’s reopening, Target Hospitality Services, the camp’s housing and dining provider, projected it would make $30 million in revenue in 2025 from what company officials described as a “seamless community reactivation” of the Dilley facility’s “open and safe environment.”
Indeed, it appears that the Dilley site’s reopening is only the beginning when it comes to the White House’s plans to “reactivate communities” to house people detained by ICE.
The “Big, Beautiful” megabill Trump signed into law last month contains $45 billion alone for detention sites that could lock up an estimated 100,000-plus people.
Soon, the Dilley detention center may not even be the nearest family camp to Crystal City.
Documents obtained by the ACLU in April reveal that Target Hospitality submitted a bid to ICE to open a family camp with 300-plus beds outside Carrizo Springs, a 20-minute drive from Crystal City.
“Ability to expand to meet any demand,” read bullet points in Target’s pitch. “Hard-sided, non-punitive environment (like Dilley).”
“Currently awaiting utilization and activation,” the last bullet point noted.
U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a frequent critic of Trump’s immigration policies, has noticed the connection between the expansion of internment sites in the 1940s and the current buildout of detention centers.
“We hold out what happened during World War II and the internment of Japanese, German Americans, Italian Americans, as a kind of horror that we would never want to see again in the United States of America,” the San Antonio Democrat said after visiting the Karnes County Immigration Processing Center two hours east of Dilley last Friday.
“But that’s exactly the direction that the Trump Administration is heading when you see ICE agents on the street with masks, with no badge, with no identification going and snatching people up,” Castro said. “That’s exactly where we’re headed, and I think, like many folks, I’m hoping that we don’t get there, but we’re certainly headed there.”
A World War II-era internee from Costa Rica, Heidi Gurcke Donald, 85, was imprisoned as a 3-year-old in Crystal City alongside her sister, her German father and her American-citizen mother.
Gurcke Donald now works with the German-American Internee Coalition (GAIC), an advocacy group that aids those seeking information about those of German descent who were disappeared or interned during the 1940s. To this day, Americans and Latin Americans of German and Italian descent have yet to receive any compensation or acknowledgment of wrongdoing from the U.S. government.
Gurcke Donald said she’s not optimistic about the current political climate.
“I think a new administration might close Dilley again … and stop calling every single immigrant a rapist and a gang member … but the division in the country is, I believe, humongous, and I don’t know whether it’s going to hold together,” she said.
Gurcke Donald added that GAIC continues to receive requests from people looking for loved ones who disappeared under the U.S. government’s prisoner-exchange program. Sometimes the organization can help. Other times, it’s unable to find the individuals’ whereabouts.
“If the current administration has its way, a lot will be whitewashed or simply removed from history books,” she added. “The separation of families in Trump 1.0 is already just a footnote. The [old Crystal City historical marker, which neglects to mention families of German and Italian descent] is both beautiful and a lie … . The immigrants sent to Panama’s Darien Gap, those sent to Costa Rica, those in El Salvadoran prisons — who will remember them?”
‘It’s always with you’
For all of the talk of facts and figures at the Dilley City Council meeting, no one voiced concern about the physical and psychological harm that might stem from detention in the town. Immigrant-rights advocates and pediatricians have repeatedly raised concerns about the toll the camps take on those held prisoner inside, especially children.
It seems likely that, as in the ’40s, there will be many stories left untold out of shame and “Gitterkranheit,” or fence sickness.
As Eddie Friedman — a Jewish man imprisoned alongside self-proclaimed Nazis because all of them were of German descent — once explained, those interned during World War II began to “feel like a criminal.”
“When you finally get out, you would rather not talk about the past,” he added.
As in that earlier era, some caught up in mass deportations will die without ever again calling a place home. There will be those who die unreported deaths from diseases such as tuberculosis or bacterial infections or respiratory illnesses which are easy to contract in detention camps, as writer Jack Herrera warned this March in the New Yorker.
And, now as then, there will be plenty of trauma to go around. After University of Illinois-Springfield law professor Deborah Anthony did pro-bono work at the Dilley detention site in 2019, she described the harrowing situation faced by women and children there in a gripping online post.
Even though Crystal City survivor Shimizu left that South Texas camp behind 78 years ago, the camp never left him.
“It’s not like a guiding principle or anything, but it’s always, it’s never not there,” he said. “Our parents couldn’t deny that it happened to us, because, you know, we were right there. That experience was never shrouded in that way to us, and we never forgot it either.”
Fellow survivor Naganuma agreed.
“It’s always with you, because you’re reminded in different reasons in the news for their day-to-day,” he said. “There’s a saying that we have about stop repeating history, and that’s what’s going on right now. And it’s important that anyone, everyone … fight back about this and protest about it.”
Naganuma acknowledged he’s not as involved in trying to keep public awareness alive as he could be. Age has made it harder to continue that mission.
“But you know, I listen to the news and see what’s going on,” he said. “It’s a shame that not just this but so many other laws are being broken, and everything’s going to go through the courts. And by that time, hopefully the new administration will be [here] in next four years, but it’s going to take that long … and meanwhile, people are suffering.
“I feel, especially now that I’m older, rather helpless. I don’t have that kind of energy to do things that I would like to. And most of us that are still surviving from the camps, we’re all in our 80s, some even older.”
He paused. “I think our country has a short memory.”
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This article appears in Jul 23 – Aug 6, 2025.