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Back from the Underworld

How did the granddaughter of incarcerated Japanese Americans wind up on ICE’s payroll? Japanese internment camp in Manzanar, California, Ansel Adams. | Library of Congress

Three days before Thanksgiving, on November 25, 2019, two Yonsei activists and descendants of incarceration, Linda Sachiko Morris and Lauren Sumida, visited the offices of the Nakamoto Group in Washington, D.C. They were hoping to meet with the CEO, Jennifer Nakamoto—also Yonsei, also a descendant of incarceration—to deliver a petition calling for the termination of her company’s contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Nakamoto Group, a private, for-profit company, was contracted to conduct annual inspections of approximately 120 of ICE’s migrant detention facilities, and it had been called out, by everyone from immigrant rights groups to the Department of Homeland Security, for its failure to properly do so, the consequences of which were the increasingly fatal conditions of migrant detention in the United States.

Morris and Sumida, representing Tsuru for Solidarity, were joined by activists from Sanctuary DMV and 18 Million Rising. They arrived at the second floor of a nondescript office building carrying eight bankers boxes, each containing the names of a thousand signatories to the petition and several envelopes containing statements prepared by other Japanese American community organizations, including Nikkei Progressives, the Japanese Community Youth Council, Densho, and Nikkei Resisters.

They were making this visit on behalf of the community and were carrying, with their petition, the force of its collective experience. But part of that community, however painful it might be to accept, included Jennifer Nakamoto. Her maternal grandparents were incarcerated in Poston, an internment camp in Arizona for Japanese Americans during WWII. Her mother was born there. In an alternate universe, Nakamoto might have been the one visiting someone by whom she felt betrayed. Because even though Morris’s and Sumida’s visit was an action against state violence, the energy was that of family members staging an intervention, appealing to another family member from the heart of a shared trauma in an attempt to bring them back from the underworld.

At the time of the visit, the Nakamoto Group had been under scrutiny for its inspection practices: their preferential interview process, only interviewing people who spoke English, not Spanish or Indigenous languages; failing to report unsafe and unhealthy conditions, lack of medical and mental health care, alleged sexual assaults, and the overuse of solitary confinement.

In June 2018, DHS released a report finding that the Nakamoto Group “misrepresented the work performed in evaluating the actual conditions of the facilities,” that the inspectors were “not always thorough,” were often unable to complete inspections, and conducted inconsistent and insufficient interviews. In November 2018, eleven senators—including Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, and Cory Booker—wrote a letter to Nakamoto demanding information about the company’s contracts and procedures. In September 2019, Congress held a hearing to examine whether DHS was “doing enough” (Congress’s words) to oversee the conditions of ICE detention facilities. They called on Nakamoto to testify.

These were among the official calls for accountability. But none were as significant and searing as Morris’s and Sumida’s, because they alone were appealing from the specificity of a shared experience to the conscience of Nakamoto herself. Morris’s and Sumida’s visit was livestreamed. Laura Li, representing 18 Million Rising, recorded. The five activists emerged from an elevator and carried their boxes down a hallway to Suite 240. On the wall inside the door was an enormous fan with two goddesses riding a dragon above a sea of waves. On top of a file cabinet was a geisha doll. “Interesting décor,” Li said. The office—drop-panel ceiling, empty file trays on a sideboard, no windows—looked fake. In the center was a desk, a black computer, a canister of WD-40, and a call bell. Morris rang it.

A woman appeared from behind a wall. “Yes?” she said, in a tone that suggested she knew why they were there, but was pretending, hard, that she did not. Morris introduced the groups, the reason they were there, and asked if Nakamoto was in.

“No,” the woman said.

“Is there anyone who can speak on her behalf?” “No. It’s the holiday week, they’re all out.” “Would we be able to speak to you?”

When Morris explained that they were delivering a petition calling for the Nakamoto Group to end its contracts with ICE, the woman began calculating her way out of the room. “Give me one second,” she said, then disappeared.

While they waited, Sumida turned to the livestream: “We’re hoping to be able to deliver not only the petition but approximately two hundred paper cranes, which were folded in memory of all those who have died in ICE custody. We are hoping that the Nakamoto Group will be able to accept these cranes as a first step to hold themselves accountable for being complicit in mass incarceration and abuses of immigrants.”

Five minutes passed. Morris rang the bell again. Six minutes. A large man appeared from behind the wall and stood at the edge of the room. “Hi, can I help you?” he asked, Morris introduced the groups again, explained that they had a petition and statements they wanted to deliver to Nakamoto, and asked that if she was not in, could they leave them with the man or the woman, or on the desk? The man offered so many excuses—“No one’s here who can accept them,” “I work here part-time,” “I’m on a tight deadline”—that it seemed as if he did not want the visitors to leave, but enjoyed their company.

Finally, he threatened to call the cops. He did not brandish a phone though, or make a move toward one, but continued to stand there, hands in pockets. The woman returned. Morris asked why they could not simply leave the petition and the statements on the desk. When it seemed that the impasse was not going to hold any longer, Sumida, holding the tsuru, spoke.

“We came here carrying a lot of pain from other members of our community.” They spoke plaintively, holding back tears. “We just wanted a chance to be able to share what Ms. Nakamoto has done. It’s unacceptable to our community. The way that she has used her history is disgusting. And we wanted this place, this space, to speak on behalf of our community. From what happened to us and our families during WWII, being incarcerated in the camps, forced out of their homes, their businesses. My grandfather couldn’t keep going to school. His father was arrested after Pearl Harbor and taken to a Department of Justice camp.” It was the first moment, in the office, in which a family member was invoked, in which the potential abstraction of the past was clarified in the invocation of a person, My grandfather.

“I don’t know what that has to do with our contract,” the woman said, “but you gotta go.”

Morris intervened. “During her congressional testimony, Ms. Nakamoto spoke specifically about her family’s history of incarceration during WWII. She invoked that history and that is not just her history. That history belongs to us. That history belongs to our community.”

The desk in the center of the room reminded me of a desk I had seen in an exhibition in the Presidio, San Francisco: a replica of the desk of John DeWitt, commanding general of the Western Defense Command, which was formed in March 1941 to control the Pacific coast. “A Jap’s a Jap,” DeWitt infamously said. “It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not.” The desk was on an elevated platform in the center of the main gallery, a monstrously illuminated fetish object. This, I thought, is what a desk looks like prior to becoming a museum piece, when it is still in the midst of its violence: inconspicuous, mundane, a little downcast, disheveled. I imagined it becoming the centerpiece, and the black hole, of a future exhibition, one highlighting—while commemorating—the early twenty-first century phase of the unending tradition of migrant detention in the United States.

Jennifer Nakamoto spoke before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight and Management on September 26, 2019. Her microphone was off. A man leaned in to turn it on. “Sorry,” Nakamoto whispered, five times. “Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.” She introduced the Nakamoto Group as a “woman-owned, minority-owned, small, disadvantaged business,” although she did not clarify the meaning of “small” or “disadvantaged.” From 2015 to 2019, the Nakamoto Group received $22,538,084 from ICE, and had just received, shortly before the hearing, an additional $3,738,177.

“My great-grandparents immigrated to the United States from Japan,” she said. “My maternal grandparents were born in California, making them United States citizens. After Pearl Harbor, the Presidential Order was issued to incarcerate all Japanese, regardless of their citizenship status. My maternal family were living in California and had to relinquish all of their property including any businesses that they had. They were given one trash bag to fill of personal items to take with them and had to leave everything else behind. Our family was spread out to various internment camps across the country. My maternal grandparents were incarcerated in a Japanese internment camp in Arizona. They were there long enough to meet, fall in love, get married, have a baby—my mother.”

After sharing her family’s story, Nakamoto recounted the origins of the Nakamoto Group, which she started in 2003. She did not seem embattled or ashamed, only ill-prepared. Her answers to questions regarding basic information about the Nakamoto Group’s practices were confused. She turned around several times to look at someone in the gallery. She ended several answers mid-sentence, did not answer some questions at all. “What is the value of your current contracts with ICE?” “When do your current contracts expire?” “How many days’ notice do you provide detention facilities prior to an inspection?” “Sixty,” she said. She turned around to the gallery, then said, “Thirty.” Representative Dan Crenshaw asked if she could give an example of a “life safety” issue, which was one of the areas of inspection she mentioned. She could not. She admitted that she did not know the health and safety standards by heart. Representative Dina Titus cited the statistic that during a year-and-a-half span, migrants had been put in solitary confinement 121 times, sixteen of which lasted seventy-five days. She asked Nakamoto if she could explain the difference between solitary confinement and segregation. She could not.

“It wasn’t until I watched her face simple questions that I got a sense of her full betrayal,” wrote Sharon Yamato in Rafu Shimpo. “It seemed she decided it might be helpful to use her Japanese American heritage to try to make us forget why she was there and to give the impression that she’s somehow connected to the immigrants she’s responsible for protecting.”

“I was shaking,” Morris told me. “I was so upset in the office that I felt like my face was . . .” she touched her cheeks . . . “contorting. I felt like everything in my body was just . . . coming up, all of the pain and trauma coming up, in that office. I think there was probably a part of me that was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to say the things that I needed to say. I really wanted to be powerful and strong, but my whole body was just like, No, no, no, no, no . . .”

When Morris was in college, she took an Asian American Studies class. On the first day, when her professor asked everyone to introduce themselves, she said, “I’m half-Japanese,” to which her professor said, “Why only half?” Morris, who grew up outside of D.C., and attended a high school where she was the only Japanese American, did not know how to respond. She had never been asked that question before.

She told her class that her family was incarcerated during WWII, that her grandparents met and married in camp, but that she had been told not to ask questions about it. “I remember my parents warning me that any reminder of camp would potentially set my grandmother off,” Morris told me, “and then she would shut down for days, weeks. I think I probably learned not to ask about it before I learned what camp was.” It was the beginning of her understanding of what camp meant, of how its meaning was not historical, but present, and its presence was pain, which burned into Morris’s sense of identity. “I knew there was a lot of intense trauma and shame around it. And I think the shame was the biggest thing that stuck with me because that’s the thing that I think I inherited. It was just so clear to me that being Japanese American was very loaded, with a lot of grief, and a lot of self-hatred.”

Her professor gave her the assignment of talking to her grandmother, as if the silence would be dispelled by the mandate of a school assignment. Morris called her grandmother. She asked a few introductory questions, about details, mostly, which her grandmother answered without emotion. The call lasted ten minutes, maybe fifteen.

“There’s a big part of me that hoped that if we could be in a room with her, that we would be able to connect,” Morris said, about Nakamoto. “The thing that her family went through is the thing that our family went through, and even her actions—using our history to try to justify this terrible thing that she’s doing—I know where that comes from. We were coming there to call her out, but we were also coming there as community.” Nakamoto had become emblematic of a kind of assimilation that Anne Anlin Cheng describes, in The Melancholy of Race, as “the repetition of a violence (against an other that is also the self ) that she has already experienced.”

The activists carried the boxes and petitions and statements and tsuru out of the office. They left the building and gathered on the sidewalk to give their final statements to the livestream. Sumida spoke directly to Nakamoto: “Your use of your history to shield yourself is a betrayal. You have a lot of healing to do for yourself and for the harm you have caused.”

I remember thinking how generous “healing” sounded. That despite the betrayal and the harm that Nakamoto was causing, Sumida demanded that she find a way to heal. “Healing” evoked, in my mind, a long, arduous, ultimately affirming process through which Nakamoto might nurture herself and her ancestors—bruised, perhaps, by the perverse and brutal reality of their future in Nakamoto’s work—to a place of health. Because the person who has fallen farthest from community might still be considered a member of that community, and one worth saving.

Excerpted from The Afterlife is Letting Go ? 2024 by Brandon Shimoda. Reprinted with permission of City Lights Books