U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using a portion of Terminal Island to stage raids in the South Bay and across Los Angeles County, according to various local community groups and descendants of the Japanese American village that once thrived there.

Just a few hundred feet from where the Japanese American Memorial is located on Terminal Island’s Seaside Way, sits an active federal prison — and a U.S. Coast Guard base. That location, according to the community groups who hosted a Friday, June 27, press conference, is where ICE officers are staging their ongoing actions around the county. Organizers were also scheduled to host a vigil and rally to protest ICE at Sixth Street and Harbor Boulevard, in San Pedro, on Friday evening.

ICE did not respond to requests for information on Friday about whether they are using Terminal Island to stage raids.

Besides the prison, Terminal Island is also shared between the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which together comprise the busiest port complex in the nation.

Greg McManus, the deputy chief of the Port of Los Angeles Police Department, told Los Angeles harbor commissioners on Thursday, June 26, that the Department of Homeland Security has requested to use port property. But, McManus said, those requests have been denied — and will continue to be denied.

DHS “is not utilizing any” port property, McManus told the commissioners.

DHS had not requested to use Port of Long Beach property, POLB spokesperson Lee Peterson said on Friday.

But neither port owns or has jurisdiction over the land where the federal prison and Coast Guard base are located.

Los Angeles harbor Commissioner Lee Williams said Friday that while he was confident that port police were not cooperating with ICE — he does believe federal properties are being used for immigration purposes.

Williams, alongside Commissioner John Pérez, requested that the issue be on the commission’s next agenda and also that port police issue a formal statement on the matter.

“What we know — what we suspect, at least — is that folks are staying in LA, driving out to Terminal Island early in the morning, doing their staging on Terminal Island, likely on the Coast Guard base, and then leaving in smaller groups to spread out across the LA basin,” said Maya Suzuki Daniels, a coordinator for Harbor Area Peace Patrols.

Harbor Area Peace Patrols is a community patrol effort — and a collaboration between the Community Self Defense Coalition and San Pedro Neighbors for Peace and Justice — that has been monitoring and responding to ICE activity in San Pedro and the South Bay.

Representatives from Nikkei Progressives, a grassroots organization aimed at uniting the Japanese American community to stand against injustice, according to its website, were also present at the Friday event.

“We know that they are using this as a staging location and we see the increased traffic coming in and out of this area every day,” Suzuki Daniels said. “We live here. We know what is normal. We know that this is not normal on so many levels.”

Those groups have also said that witnesses have seen, and even talked to, ICE agents in green Customs and Border Patrol vests and unmarked vehicles coming out of the federal prison area.

“They refused to answer questions,” Suzuki Daniels said. “They were very unfriendly.”

ICE’s presence on Terminal Island, the organizers say, has created an unsettling feeling of familiarity for the descendants of Japanese Americans who once had a thriving community on the island — before they, too, were detained by the U.S. government and sent to internment camps during World War II.

Around 3,000 Japanese and Japanese American people lived in a small fishing village on Terminal Island by the early 1940s. More than just a company town, the village was also home to many shops, a pool hall, multiple Buddhist temples, a bank, a Shinto shrine and a school, according to the LA Conservancy.

“Separated from increasingly urban Los Angeles, Terminal Islanders created a hybrid culture of their homeland and new home,” the conservancy said. “The culture was so unique that former residents recall feeling distinct from the nearby Japanese community in Little Tokyo.”

But everything changed after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Anti-Japanese sentiment had already been growing across the nation — and after Pearl Harbor, fisherman on Terminal Island were immediately targeted by the government.

“As the post-Pearl Harbor hysteria rose, (former Rep. Martin) Dies and the American Legion fueled public and media outcry for the removal of Japanese and Japanese Americans who lived near locations strategic to the war effort,” LA Conservancy said. “Located next to a U.S. Navy facility, the fishing village was the first to experience the effects of this campaign.”

After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in 1942 — which over the next six months, resulted in about 122,000 Japanese men, women and children being forcibly removed from their homes and sent to internment camps, according to the National Archives — Terminal Island residents were given 48 hours to leave.

Most Terminal Island residents were incarcerated at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in Owens Valley for the duration of World War II.

“After the evacuation, the Navy demolished all of the residents’ homes and nearly all of the other structures, including the Shinto shrine,” the LA Conservancy said. “While many Japanese and Japanese Americans across the West Coast lost their homes and property during this period, Terminal Island was the only community whose built environment vanished almost entirely.”

Now, just two buildings from the original fishing village remain on Terminal Island. In 2002, the Terminal Islanders Club erected the Japanese Fishing Village Memorial, which stands just down the street from where ICE is apparently staging its immigration raids.

“We are standing here on hallowed ground. Terminal Island represented what my grandfather was hoping to find when he emigrated here from Japan,” John Tonai, a descendent of Terminal Islanders, said on Friday. “It was a place that was given an opportunity to create a new life for himself, to work hard and raise a family. It represented his American dream, the same as the other Terminal Islanders — and the same as the migrants who are being rounded up and incarcerated today.”

Tonai said that his grandfather, who eventually left the fishing industry and moved off Terminal Island in the early 1940s to start a chain of produce stands, was twice visited by FBI agents, Once in the summer of 1941, and again a few months later.

“The next time they visited him was the evening of December 7, 1941, when they ripped him away from his family and sent him — a man who had done nothing wrong — to be jailed in a series of prison camps run by the Department of Justice.”

Tonai’s grandfather didn’t see his family for another three years. And when they reunited — it was at an internment camp in Colorado.

Today, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is widely considered a gross injustice by the U.S. government.

On Aug. 10, 1988, in fact, Republican President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act of 1987, which provided both a formal apology for the policy and restitution to those who were interned. The law required the United States to pay $20,000 — about $55,500 when adjusted for inflation — each to interned people.

“A grave injustice was done to both citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese ancestry by the evacuation, relocation and internment of civilians during World War II,” the law says. “These actions were carried out without adequate security reasons and without any acts of espionage or sabotage documented by the (Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians), and were motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria and a failure of political leadership.”

The law also said internment fundamentally violated basic civil liberties and constitutional rights.

Current Republican President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has made it his administration’s paramount policy initiative to aggressively deport undocument immigrants. The administration, including Trump himself, has framed immigration enforcement in existential terms, describing the number of undocumented people in the country as an invasion and saying the U.S. has been flooded with criminals — who federal officials say are the priority when it comes to mass deportations.

“The Trump administration remains relentless in our mission to apprehend and remove the scores of dangerous criminal illegal immigrants who were allowed to infiltrate our communities by incompetent politicians,” the White House said in a Friday, June 20, statement, “and we will stop at nothing until these public safety threats have been taken off our streets.”

And in early June, when ICE began conducting enforcement operations in Los Angeles County, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said those efforts are necessary to stop “the invasion of illegal criminals into the United States.” Those operations prompted a series of protests, particularly in Downtown Los Angeles, a smattering of which became violent in Downtown L.A.. In response, Trump sent the National Guard and the Marines into L.A. to protect ICE agents.

The Trump administration, particularly Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, has also argued that undocumented immigrants are not guaranteed due process before being deported.

Opponents of Trump’s mass deportation policy, for their part, have criticized ICE operations for having a much wider scope than just violent criminals.

In recent weeks, in fact, ICE agents in the L.A. area have been seen conducting operations at Home Depots, restaurants and elsewhere across Los Angeles County. On Friday morning, for example, ICE agents detained people near the El Dorado Car Wash in Wilmington, according to L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn.

“Families are being robbed of breadwinners, businesses of workers and customers,” Hahn said in a Friday statement, “and our communities are being left afraid and silenced.”

For those at Friday’s Terminal Island rally, meanwhile, the parallels between WWII internment and the current administration’s immigration efforts are clear.

“Today, ICE is going around and arresting people for doing the same thing as my grandparents — trying to make a better life for themselves,” Tonai said. “We stand here today to protest these heartless policies of our federal government. We need to stop this cycle of hate. We need to get ICE out now.”

Staff writer Donna Littlejohn contributed to this report.