October 2025: The untold stories of queer immigration
“We must learn from the past, not repeat it,” he said, adding, “Americans need to speak out.”
John Russell (He/Him)
October 17, 2025 (lgbtqnation.com)
George Takei at the “Free Birds” Premiere at Village Theater on October 13, 2013 in West Hollywood, California. | Shutterstock
George Takei sees echoes of his family’s painful history in the Trump administration’s campaign of immigrant detention and mass deportation.
“On March 14, Donald Trump signed a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act to carry out his mass deportations,” he wrote in a guest essay for the American Civil Liberties Union earlier this year. “The last time this law was invoked was during World War II, when it was weaponized to pave the way for the incarceration of Japanese Americans, including my family.”
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The out Star Trek icon has been vocal in his comparisons of masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers rounding up undocumented immigrants and throwing them into detainment centers indefinitely and without due process to his family’s own experience in a U.S. internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II.
There was a chain-link fence around the whole racetrack facility. We were unloaded and herded over to the stable area. Each family was assigned to a horse stall. For my parents, it was a degrading, humiliating, enraging experience to take their three kids to sleep in a smelly horse stall.gay Japanese-American actor George Takei
Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan in December 1941, and a rise in anti-Japanese sentiment in the U.S., President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the military to establish “military zones” in West Coast states with large Japanese American populations, and to “exclude” civilians from those zones. This led to the forced relocation of over 120,000 Japanese Americans to 10 prison camps around the U.S., each surrounded by guard towers and barbed wire.
“There were no charges. There were no trials. No due process. We were Americans imprisoned in American prison camps,” Takei explained to CNN’s Audie Cornish on a July 3 edition of her podcast The Assignment.https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZQP23uqxQoA?si=_XD1_vwoUBYaD_-B
According to History.com, two Japanese American detainees were shot and killed during a forced night march to one camp in Lordsburg, New Mexico, in March 1942. Guards at the Central Utah Relocation Center shot at at least three people for walking too close perimeter fencing, killing one.
At California’s Manzanar War Relocation Center, several detainees were injured and two killed during an incident that saw police tear-gas a crowd that had gathered near a police station. A guard shot and killed another man at northern California’s Tule Lake Segregation Center in May 1943. The following October, the accidental death of one detainee led prisoners to strike in protest of food shortages and unsafe conditions.
Takei, who was just five years old at the time, and his family were among those sent to the camps.
As he has detailed in countless interviews over the years — as well as his 2012 Broadway show Allegiance and his 2019 graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy — in 1942 he and his family were forced from their Los Angeles home and made to live in converted stables at the Santa Anita racetrack before being relocated to the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas for the duration of the war.
“I remember the terror of when the soldiers came to our Los Angeles home to order us out, and the confusion and chaos at the Santa Anita racetrack,” Takei recalled in a 2019 Time interview. “There was a chain-link fence around the whole racetrack facility. We were unloaded and herded over to the stable area. Each family was assigned to a horse stall. For my parents, it was a degrading, humiliating, enraging experience to take their three kids to sleep in a smelly horse stall.”
In his recent conversation with CNN’s Cornish, he described the “barbed wire prison camps” as located in “the most God-awful places — isolated and barren.”
For four years, Takei told Time in 2019, his family endured “a series of goading terrors.” He recalled having to line up three times each day “to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall,” having to bathe in communal showers, and searchlights following him when he would go to the latrine at night.
Takei has said that he has made it his mission in life “to raise awareness of this chapter in American history.” Sadly, recent years he has also had to sound the alarm that history is repeating itself via the Trump administration’s policies.
“We have this egocentric monster [in office],” Takei told the Los Angeles Times in July, referring to Trump. “He’s power-crazy and … now he’s causing all sorts of outrageous inhumanity — it’s beyond injustice, it’s inhumanity — and we’re going through that again. The same thing that we went through [when we were] artificially categorized as enemy alien in 1942.”
“That dark chapter in American history left scars that persist to this day. Now, we see history echoing in disturbing ways, as the government attempts to invoke the very same law that was the precursor for the incarceration of Japanese Americans to carry out mass deportations — again, without charge or trial, stripping individuals of due process,” he wrote in his essay for the ACLU.
“We must learn from the past, not repeat it. The erosion of rights and the targeting of communities based on fear and prejudice must be challenged at every turn,” he said, telling Cornish, “Americans need to speak out.”
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John Russell is a writer and editor based in New York City. In addition to covering politics and entertainment for LGBTQ Nation, he has written for Vanity Fair, Slate, People, Billboard, and Out. He also writes about film, TV, and pop culture in his free newsletter Johnny Writes…