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An otherwise quiet Saturday in Dublin was marked by a sizable crowd at Don Biddle Community Park as local residents and activists from throughout the Bay Area gathered to continue pushing back against proposed plans to reopen a scandal ridden prison in the city as an ICE detention facility.
It was the third protest of its kind in the months since news that ICE officials had toured the FCI Dublin facility in February, following an agreement that month between the Bureau of Prisons and Department of Homeland Security to allow the latter to use federal prison properties as detention centers.
While details of the proposed reopening of the facility have been sparse, the movement against the potential plan has gained steam, with hundreds gathering over the weekend as the roster of supporters continues to grow.
At the July 19 protest, the voices of those impacted by Japanese American incarceration during World War II took center stage with calls against repeating history.
“The parallels that are going now are all too chilling,” said Douglas Yoshida, a physician at Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley.
“It’s history repeating itself over and over again,” Yoshida continued. “Conjuring a foreign invasion, Trump has again cited the Alien Enemies Act to arrest, brutalize, and incarcerate tens of thousands of immigrants like Miguel Lopez.”
Lopez, a longtime Livermore resident, was detained by ICE officers in San Francisco in May, then deported to Mexico last month, bringing the nationwide impacts of the federal government’s immigration crackdown home to the Tri-Valley.
Yoshida, whose parents were among the approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals who were forced out of their homes and into detention camps by the U.S. government during World War II, is one of a growing number of outspoken voices against Lopez’s deportation, as well as those calling for the permanent closure of the Dublin prison that was plagued by sex abuse, medical neglect, and crumbling infrastructure including mold and asbestos.
“That was in 1942,” Yoshida said. “Now imagine you came here from Mexico as a teenager. You’ve lived here for 27 years. Your family, your wife are all U.S. citizens. You’ve applied for U.S. citizenship. You’ve had the same job for nine years. You go for your check-in with immigration and suddenly you’re arrested and deported to Mexico.”
In addition to centering Japanese American voices and drawing parallels between their mass incarceration during World War II and the present day, speakers at Saturday’s event pointed to the long history of immigration in the United States and some of the reasons for it – including the United States’ overseas military operations such as the Vietnam War.
“To understand how we got here, we must understand our own history,” said Elijah Chhum, executive director for New Light Wellness. “This year, 2025, marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the Southeast Asian wars and the beginning of the largest refugee resettlement program in the U.S. for more than one million refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos coming to the U.S. in the 1970s and ’80s. We must remember that if the U.S. was not there, we would not be here.”
Despite the grim tone of the history lessons at Saturday’s protest, the event was also marked by a jovial feeling among the hundreds in attendance, who were also treated to Taiko drum and dance performances and an array of artwork, including paper cranes that interspersed the signs calling for “ICE out of Dublin” and comparing images of detention during World War II with the present day.
“I am so grateful to be among so many powerful speakers today – survivors of violence, our descendants here of the U.S internment of Japanese Americans and of immigrant community members that you heard from today, who have been kidnapped, who have been detained, who have been separated from their families,” said Alameda County Supervisor Nicki Fortunato Bas. “And we know we are here because we will not let this happen to anyone ever again.”
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