Redress Claims Pressed for WWII Internment

With only a year left before the federal government stops reparations to Japanese Americans who suffered internment and other discrimination during World War II, several civil rights groups Monday complained that about 3,300 people are being unfairly denied redress.

Roughly 80,000 individuals have received written apologies and cash payments of $20,000 apiece since the reparations program began nine years ago.

But the government has refused redress to three groups, including Latin Americans of Japanese heritage who faced similar indignities, activists said at a news conference in Little Tokyo. That refusal has soured the original apologies, they said.

“Some people say [to us], ‘Why are you doing this?’ ” said Alicia Nishimoto, who has received no apology for being taken from her home in Peru with her family to an internment camp in Texas. “How can I forget after 50-something years what the U.S. did to us? It was a terrible experience,” added Nishimoto, now a U.S. citizen living in Gardena.

In 1988, the federal government began a 10-year effort to issue apologies and compensation to nearly all former ethnic Japanese internees still alive.

Between 1942 and 1945, 2,264 Japanese Latin Americans were taken from their homes by their governments, transported to the United States and confined to internment camps, according to a 1982 congressional report.

“We shared the same camp with the Japanese Americans. They were given the compensation,” said Nishimoto, one of five named plaintiffs in a class-action suit against the government for reparations.

Japanese Latin Americans have been told that they are not eligible for apologies or compensation because they were not legal immigrants when interned, said Robin Toma, the group’s lead attorney.

The Office of Redress Administration in the U.S. Department of Justice could not be reached for comment on Monday’s protest.

The other two groups excluded from reparations are: children born to former internees from their January 1945 release to June 30, 1946, despite the government’s 1988 pledge to compensate victims for suffering up to the latter date, and railroad workers who were not in the camps but who were fired.