History Repeats: Trump's Use of Former Japanese Internment Camps for Imprisoned Migrants
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In August of 2025, the Trump administration initiated an immigrant detention site at Fort Bliss, Texas. This newly constructed facility, named Camp East Montana, is a tent-based detention center that is set to hold up to 5,000 detainees, beginning with about 1,000 migrants that are awaiting deportation proceedings under the oversight of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Trump administration claims that this site is necessary to reduce overcrowding in other ICE facilities and maintain order at the border.
However, the site’s served purpose and dark past raises concerns amongst many. Critics argue that the conditions of the site for prolonged confinement and limited access are inhumane and unsuitable for these migrants.
What is Fort Bliss?
Fort Bliss is a United States army base that has provided military training for artillery and missile defenses, located in El Paso, Texas. It carries a deep and complex history, branching all the way back to the 18th century. In early 1942, following the bombing of Pearl Harbour in late 1941, the base served as a temporary internment camp that housed Japanese American immigrants along with German and Italian immigrants. Under these executive wartime orders, these “enemy aliens” were held under strict national security in cramped barracks with limited resources and inadequate facilities to aid themselves. This system of wartime incarceration has been widely condemned as a civil liberties failure.
What Does This Say about Our Government?
This decision to detain thousands of migrants on former internment sites–camps that are marked by an extremely dark history–represents the disturbing normalization of mass detention in the United States. This policy framework reflects a system that goes against humanitarian standards and focuses more on punishment and enforcement. It also blurs the line between civil authority and military authority, repurposing the military site to manage a civil immigration issue.
What is more striking is that this is not the first time that the federal government has looked to former internment camps for migrant detention. In June of 2019, the Trump administration briefly considered using Fort Sill, another former World War II internment camp located in Lawton, Okla. to detain unaccompanied migrant children. However, the plan was eventually abandoned after strong criticism from human rights activist groups and past Japanese internment camp survivors, who saw this move as a dangerous repeat of past mistakes.
This repetition of using former internment areas for modern-day detention raises troubling questions about how the United States government views history. Reusing a space that was once associated with wartime internment sends a disturbing message that the government holds a lack of historical accountability and how the cycle of fear and exclusion repeats.