George Takei has followed former First Lady Laura Bush by comparing President Donald Trump‘s family separation tactics at the border with his own time in the Japanese Internment camps during World War II.
The Star Trek actor penned a powerful op-ed for Foreign Policy about his experience living in the internment camps when the U.S. government temporarily held all Japanese-American citizens during the war. But while Donald Trump’s government is starting to do the same with some immigrant families crossing the border in search of asylum, Takei says there’s one huge and heartbreaking difference.
“At least during the internment, when I was just 5 years old, I was not taken from my parents,” Takei wrote. “We were not pulled screaming from our mothers’ arms. We were not left to change the diapers of younger children by ourselves.”
Nearly 2,000 children were separated from their families during a six-week period in April and May as the Trump administration adopted a “zero-tolerance” policy for illegal entry into the United States, TIME reported on Saturday.
In the essay, Takei recalls the horrors his family endured and remembers all of them being crammed into one stall and later arriving at a camp where armed guard pointed their guns at them while they were being held. But Takei says living through the trauma with his family intact is how they survived.
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“At least during the internment, we remained a family, and I credit that alone for keeping the scars of our unjust imprisonment from deepening on my soul,” he wrote. “I cannot for a moment imagine what my childhood would have been like had I been thrown into a camp without my parents. That this is happening today fills me with both rage and grief: rage toward a failed political leadership who appear to have lost even their most basic humanity, and a profound grief for the families affected.”
He concluded, “Unless we act now, we will have failed to learn at all from our past mistakes. Once again, we are flinging ourselves into a world of camps and fences and racist imagery — and lies just big enough to stick.”