Revealing the tragedy of Crystal City The Crystal City Camp: What we need to know
During World War II, train cars delivered over 6,000 civilians to guards at an American internment camp in Crystal City, a scrubby, desolate South Texas town just 35 miles from the Mexican border. Men of German, Japanese and Italian descent and their families — many of whom were U.S. citizens — were ripped from their homes across the U.S. and Latin America and deposited at the Crystal City facility without due process. They were arrested, charged with no crime and incarcerated simply because of their country or culture of origin. Texas journalist and author Jan Jarboe Russell peels back the shades on this dark period of U.S. history with her book, “The Train to Crystal City: FDR’s Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America’s Only Family Internment Camp During World War II.” This is an excerpt from the book.
The place where Earl G. Harrison, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, stood on the morning of November 6, 1942 was so strange that it might have appeared imaginary to him. Before him was a desolate landscape of dusty soil and dry cactus. The small town of Crystal City was named for a vast stretch of artesian springs, now dangerously dry due to a drought. The landscape was incongruous to the town’s name. Thirty-five miles to the south, the flat, bleached-out land empties into the mouth of the Rio Grande and across that river the land stretches wide into Mexico. It has a between worlds feeling, not quite Mexico, not quite America.
From his house in Philadelphia, it took Harrison three days on the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, known as the B&O, to arrive in Crystal City. At forty-three, Harrison made a striking impression — grave blue eyes, curly blond hair, strong jaw, broad shoulders, a face animated with thought. Harrison traveled to Crystal City that day to consider the town as a possible location for the only World War II internment camp exclusively designated for families. The camp would require enough space and facilities to house as many as 4,000 enemy aliens and their families at any given time during the war. Not many places in the United States had enough empty space to accommodate Harrison’s needs, but Texas, a state larger than Spain, certainly did.
As commissioner of the INS, Harrison had jurisdiction over 22 district offices and 10 internment camps that housed the aliens of enemy countries. The camp at Crystal City would be larger than any of the other INS camps. Its purpose was to suitably house a wide variety of enemy aliens, including Germans, Japanese, Italians, from the United States and 13 Latin American countries — and their innocent wives and children. Many of these menwere leaders in their respective communities — Buddhist and Shinto priests, German and Japanese businessmen, menof great wealth from Peru, Bolivia, Brazil and other countries.
In Harrison’s mind, the need for a camp to reunite families was a humanitarian step but he had his hands full, especially with the Latin American phase of the internment process. In October 1941, the State Department reached secret agreements with Panama, Peru, Guatemala and 13 other countries in Latin America for the arrest and deportation of Axis nationals. As early as July 1941, newspapers in Latin American countries published “La Lista Negra” — the black list — of Axis nationals. Hours after Roosevelt declared war on December 8, Guatemala froze the assets of Japanese, Germans and Italians and restricted travel. Costa Rica ordered all Japanese interned. Police in practically every Latin American country, except Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil, arrested fathers first, held them in jail and deported them to the United States on American troop ships. Their families were then arrested and deported as well. The U.S. justification for the arrests was to protect national security.
Once the Latin Americans set foot on American soil in ports in NewOrleans or California, the INS was in charge. Officers immediately arrested them for “illegal entry.” They were de-loused with strong showers, sprayed with DDTandloaded onto trains bound for internment camps. “The rationale for this international form of kidnapping was that by immobilizing influential
The general history of America’s internment of its own citizens during World War II has long been focused on the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese, 62 percent of them U.S.-born, who were forcibly evacuated from the Pacific coast after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
But few people know that Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which permitted the roundup of Japanese immigrants and their U.S.-born children, also paved the way for the arrest of Germans and Italians who the FBI considered security risks and labeled as “enemy aliens.” Indeed, the day before Roosevelt signed the order, FBI agents had arrested 264 Italians, 1,296 Germans and 2,209 Japanese on the East and West Coast. The hunt for perceived enemies was on. What was the secret enemy exchange program and why was it created? Long before Pearl Harbor was attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, Roosevelt knew that war with Germany and Japan was inevitable and prepared for its eventuality. On Sept. 1, 1939 — the day before German tanks invaded Poland — Roosevelt created a top-secret division within the Department of State called the Special War Problems Division to identify American civilians — POWS, businessmen, journalists, missionaries — who would be in danger in the event of war. Roosevelt authorized the Special Division to create a pool of Japanese, Germans and Italian enemy aliens and their families who could be used as hostages for prisoner exchange with the more valuable Americans in Europe and the Far East. Throughout the war, the Special Division negotiated numerous secret prisoner exchanges, many of them drawn from the internees in the Crystal City Internment Camp. How was the Crystal City Internment Camp involved in the exchanges? From 1942 to 1948, secret government trains delivered enemy alien fathers and their completely innocent wives and children to the isolated South Texas town. The camp was created to reunite families who’d been separated when their fathers were arrested. It was the only family camp during the war — it had schools, churches, sports fields, a beer hall for the German internees and acres of farmland maintained by the Japanese. It functioned as a tiny town. But the internees lived behind 10-foot-high barbed wire fences, under constant surveillance by armed guards. They were subject to daily counts. All of their mail was censored. The Special War Problems Division organized the exchanges from Crystal City. By circumstance, many of the children who were exchanged into war in Germany and Japan were American citizens. Their fathers were born in Germany and Japan and the children had no choice but to go with their parents into war.
German and Japanese nationals whomight aid and abet the Axis war effort in the Latin-American countries where they lived, the United States was preventing the spread of Nazism throughout the hemisphere and thereby strengthening its own security,” wrote Geraldo Mangione, who worked for Harrison at the INS. According to Mangione, many in the INS, including himself, opposed the policy of arresting Latin Americans. One of the officers in charge of an INS camp told Mangione: “Only in wartime could we get away with such fancy skullduggery.”
In the wake of all that had occurred, Harrison wanted the camps under his jurisdiction to be as efficiently and humanely administered as possible. By law, interned civilians were not officially subject to the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, but the policy of the U.S. government was the treatment of enemy aliens should follow the principles of the convention, even though in most camps the principles were loosely applied. For instance, the Geneva Convention does not allow multiple nationalities of prisoners to be interned in the same camp, but in Crystal City that provision was ignored: Japanese, Germans and Italians lived uneasily sideby-side.
It was November and the temperature was80degrees as Harrison walked around a 240-acre Crystal City site, formerly used as migrant worker camp for Mexican laborers wholived in Victory Huts that offered little shelter from the weather. Harrison had many practical issues to consider: how many miles of roads would have to be built, how many more cottages erected, the cost of a 10-foot high security fence and a guard tower suitable for 24-hour surveillance of internees. Much of the camp would have to be built from the ground up. He estimated it would take a million dollars or more to get the camp up and running.
Onthe other hand, the isolated location of the camp was also a positive. Crystal City, situated 1,500 and 1,800 miles from the East and West coasts, areas that were considered vital to the war effort, was not a likely target for sabotage. By the next day when Harrison boarded the train to make his journey home, he’d made his decision. Crystal City would be the location of the family camp. Copyright 2015 by Jan Jarboe Russell. Repinted by permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.