DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker at Seagoville lays out — every word of it worth hearing. December 7, 1941. The Empire of Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the United States is propelled into World War II.
Now, a nation at war is a nervous thing, and the U.S. government moved fast — some would say faster than it should have. One response was the incarceration of more than 120,000 people: Issei, that's first-generation Japanese immigrants, and Nisei, their children, born right here as U.S. citizens. War Relocation Authority camps scattered across the country swallowed them up.
But that wasn't the whole of it. Through separate confinement programs, thousands more — Japanese, German, and Italian citizens living in the United States — were classified as Enemy Aliens and detained by the Department of Justice through its enemy alien control unit. In many cases, their U.S. citizen relatives went right along with them.
The Department of State's Special War Problems Division reached even further, pulling people in from Latin America as well. Enemy aliens were held until they were paroled or exchanged for U.S. and Allied citizens seized overseas by Axis nations. You were, in a sense, a bargaining chip.
Texas bore more than its share of this weight. The state hosted three Department of Justice confinement sites, administered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service — at Crystal City, at Kenedy, and here, at Seagoville. The U.S.
Army ran two more Temporary Detention Stations, at Fort Sam Houston and Fort Bliss. Now, next to historic Ellis Island in New York, the marker tells us the most aesthetically attractive INS confinement site was arguably right here at Seagoville — which is a strange and quietly haunting thing to say about a place where people were held against their will. Originally built in 1941 as a women's reformatory, the Seagoville Enemy Alien Detention Station was transferred from the Bureau of Prisons to the INS on April 1, 1942.
What they built here was, by the grim standards of wartime detention, almost startling in its completeness. German and Italian childless couples and single women — detained in the U.S. or brought up from Latin America — were held on these grounds. There was a hospital.
An auditorium that doubled as a school. Industry and service buildings. Three hundred and fifty-two dormitory-style living quarters.
And set apart in what was called a colony, fifty Victory Huts housed Japanese Latin Americans. At its peak in 1943, Seagoville held 650 internees and 120 staff. The detention station closed in May 1945.
The Bureau of Prisons took the site back, and has administered it as a prison from the end of the war to this day. So this patch of Dallas County holds two chapters in one place — a reformatory, a detention station, and then a prison, all in the same buildings, the same grounds. The people who passed through here as internees came from three continents, spoke half a dozen languages, and had done nothing to any American soldier.
They were simply classified. And the land remembers, even when the rest of us might rather not.
What the marker says
Seagoville Enemy Alien Detention Station, World War II Shocked by the December 7, 1941, Empire of Japan attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii that propelled the U.S. into World War II, one U.S. Government response was the incarceration of more than 120,000 Issei (first generation, Japanese immigrants) and Nisei (second generation, U.S. citizens) in War Relocation Authority camps across the country. Through separate confinement programs, thousands of Japanese, German, and Italian citizens in the U.S. (and in many cases, their U.S. citizen relatives), classified as Enemy Aliens, were detained by the Department of Justice (DOJ) through its enemy alien control unit, and, in Latin America, by the Department of State's Special War Problems Division. Enemy aliens were held until paroled or exchanged for U.S. and Allied citizens seized overseas by Axis nations. Texas hosted three DOJ confinement sites, administered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) at Crystal City, Kenedy, and here, as well as two U.S. Army Temporary Detention Stations at Fort Sam Houston and Fort Bliss. Next to historic Ellis Island (New York), the most aesthetically attractive INS confinement site was arguably at Seagoville. Originally built in 1941, as a women's reformatory, Seagoville Enemy Alien Detention Station was transferred from the DOJ's Bureau Of Prisons (BOP) to the INS on April 1, 1942. The internment camp held German and Italian childless couples and single women detained in the U.S. or Latin America. The site included a hospital, auditorium-school, industry and service buildings, and 352 dorm-esque living quarters. Japanese Latin Americans were held in a "colony" of 50 Victory Huts. In 1943, the population peaked at 650 internees and 120 staff. The detention station closed in May 1945, returning to the BOP which has administered the site as a prison since the end of the war. Texas in World War II -- 2013