Dr. Satsuki Ina on Migrant Detention, Racism and COVID19

Source: Satsuki Ina, photo by Kiyoshi Ina, with permission

I had the pleasure of conversing with Dr. Satsuki Ina on March 25, 2020. Our 35 minute talk is available on the Pacific Heart Podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes podcasts, and Stitcher. Below is a partial transcript of some of our exchange, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Dr. Satsuki Ina was born in the Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum security American concentration camp during WWII. She says she was born "doing time." She has dedicated her career as a psychologist to understanding and healing the effects of this collective and historical trauma on Japanese Americans. She is a co-organizer of Tsuru for Solidarity (Tsuru is the Japanese word for the crane, symbolizing peace), found on Facebook as well, which is working to end detention sites and to support front-line immigrant and refugee communities that are being targeted by racist, inhumane immigration policies. The vulnerable people in detention sites are likely to be heavily affected by coronavirus, and Dr. Ina also reflects on how infectious disease affected incarcerated Japanese Americans.

“It’s been a lifetime work to uncover what happened to me and my family, and learn more about what happened to our community because of long-term incarceration….History is repeating itself. This repeating pattern is part of American history…for many communities of color. The current immigration policies that have targeted people seeking asylum and criminalizing them has awakened a roaring lion not just in myself but in our Japanese American community who can see how the rhetoric of this current administration, the policies that have been implemented have been based in racism and economic benefit once again.”

– Dr. Satsuki Ina

SI: “The COVID19 spread brought to mind the epidemics that occurred while we were incarcerated as children. Living in confinement, with communal bathrooms and mess hall dining, very poor sanitation sanitation standards, the lack of soap and the lack of medical care that led to various epidemics in the different camps… My brother got chickenpox first, and we were quarantined all together, and once he recovered then I contracted it. My mother, brother and I were quarantined for almost three months inside these barracks. It brought to mind the dangers, today, of the detention facilities where unsanitary conditions – lack of running water for each person and access to soap. I inquired about what it would take for us to deliver hand sanitizer to local detention facilities…I was told by an ACLU attorney that they already have a backlog of hand sanitizer, but they don’t dispense it because it’s a risk that someone may drink it. Which I find a poor excuse for depriving people trying to keep themselves safe.”

RC: The pandemic’s root causes are the narcissism and racism that we’ve seen arise in the last few years, in that self-centeredness and lack of compassion are markers for poor care, planning etc. Racism also exacerbates the dangers of such a volatile moment. WWII also saw fears displaced onto Japanese Americans. How have you been carrying that resonance?”

SI: “What came to mind for me was Murray Bowen’s work on social anxiety… he described that when there is widespread social anxiety, that a whole society of people will look to bind their anxiety by finding a scapegoat. That is exactly what happened in World War II. Certainly people were frightened after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the immediate scapegoat that was the most vulnerable, and with a lack of leadership to redirect that effort to scapegoat (was Japanese Americans)…we ended up with our Constitutional rights being violated and being incarcerated for several years. Today it feels like again this pandemic has stirred fear in people across the globe, and our president uses language like ‘Chinese Virus’ and makes jokes with his staffer who says it’s the ‘Kung Flu,’ and this has resulted in people violently attacking, physically and verbally, people of Asian ancestry. He’s putting the Asian face on the coronavirus, leading to dangerous circumstances for people who look like me.”

RC: What’s your sense of how things changed from the Obama to Trump administrations regarding migrant detentions.

SI: “The difference is the extreme criminalization of the asylum seekers. Viewing and treating them as if they were a real threat to our national security. Whereas I think Obama was trying to solve the problem. Obama’s intent was to close down those large detention facilities. Trump is now making funds, millions of dollars, available to continue these private prison industrial complexes. Private organizations are being paid with your tax dollars to hold mothers and children in detention. It has now become a major profit making enterprise. The profiteering that is being made possible by mass incarceration wasn’t part of the Obama administration’s problem-solving effort.”

RC: I first learned of your work through your documentary “Children of the Camps,” available on Kanopy and other streaming platforms. Maybe you can talk about the psychological effects that you have seen over decades in the Japanese American community, and think about what kind of effects we’re leaving behind on the children and all people who are treated this way.

SI: “Trump’s use of descriptors of Mexicans as ‘rapists and criminals’ is very resonant, because we Japanese Americans were charged without evidence of being ‘spies and saboteurs.’ Using that language gives permission and provides widespread categorization of people that dehumanizes them. As a result of the dehumanization and criminalization, targeted victims internalize the message that something is flawed about them, something is dark and evil about them, especially when they’re young. I actually went into the detention facilities in South Texas in 2015. I saw the look on the children’s faces that reminded me of a photo of myself when I was held in the Tule Lake Center. The vacant, withdrawn, sad expression. Stoic, in many ways. It was very disturbing… None of the children were playing with toys they were provided. They were all clinging to their mothers. As a therapist with Japanese Americans who were victims of the concentration camps during World War II, I am so disturbed by what is being done to these children today. That fracturing of our sense of self, the shame and humiliation that gets internalized and then acted out in ways that perpetuate negative consequences for people. Japanese Americans were categorized as a model minority, and in that categorization was the trauma effect. We grew up so fearful of making a mistake, of offending anybody. The fear that any random misstep could lead to our loss of freedom again. That somehow we were inferior, that we didn’t deserve a place at the table. And shame and self-hatred for how I looked in the mirror. I think about these children today and I heard mothers describe how their children were beginning to act out, and how the anger was directed at the mother. I could understand how the children could feel so angry, and not able to direct it at anybody but the person who was supposed to keep them safe. The promise of the grueling journey across country and to the border, the promise that when we get there everything will be okay, when in fact they were shackled and dragged and put into these cement rooms with no blankets, no comfort, and incarcerated indefinitely. Indefinite detention is a form of torture. It was something we Japanese Americans experienced too. We never knew how long we were going to be held, or what it would take for us to be released. I think these children are being hurt so deeply. How to repair that is what I think about, in terms of generations of trauma being transmitted.”

(c) 2020 Ravi Chandra, M.D., D.F.A.P.A.