The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange by Jan Jarboe Russell Page A

Crystal City became the county seat of Zavala County.The train was a lifeline for the tiny town. In 1930, 3,959 train cars of spinach, 443 cars of onions, 214 cars of vegetable plants, and 140 cars of cattle were shipped from Crystal City.
    Twelve years later, when Harrison arrived in Crystal City, the population had climbed to six thousand, 90 percent Mexicans and their children, most born in America. The town was divided into two segregated neighborhoods. Mexicans lived to the west, many of them in fifteen-by-twelve casitas made of adobe. In the morning, women hosed down their porches and watered their trees and plants. In the late afternoon, men gathered in backyards under the merciful shade of pecan, orange, and tangerine trees. They pulled chairs around small tables and listened to Spanish-language radio and played dominoes. To the east lived the Anglo population, farmers, small-business owners, doctors, teachers, and police officers. Though Anglos were newcomers to a land that was originally part of Mexico, they nonetheless saw themselves as dominant and viewed the Mexican Americans as outsiders. Schools were segregated, as were hospitals and funeral homes. The language spoken on the streets was a hybrid: English, Spanish, and both languages rolled into one, a mixture called Tex-Mex. In so vast and isolated a region, identity was confused and complex.
    From his house in Rose Valley, a bucolic suburb of Philadelphia, it took Harrison three days on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to arrive in Crystal City. At forty-three, Harrison made a striking impression—grave blue eyes, wavy blond hair, strong jaw, broad shoulders, a face animated with thought. His friends called him an “indefatigable worker” and marveled at his capacity for long hours on the job. His secretary, Miss Margaret Paul Parker, who workedby his side six days a week for twenty-five years, described him as “always industrious,” a “real doer.” Harrison traveled to Crystal City that day to consider the town as a possible location for the only family camp for internees and their families during World War II. This much Harrison knew for sure: the future camp would be busy and require enough space and facilities to house as many as four thousand internees and their families at any given time during the war. Not many places in the United States offered enough empty space to accommodate Harrison’s needs, but Texas, a state larger than Spain, certainly did.
    As commissioner of the INS, which in 1940 had become part of the Department of Justice, Harrison had jurisdiction over twenty-two district offices and ten internment camps that housed the aliens of enemy countries. During the war, the US government operated more than thirty camps, some administered by the Army; others by the War Relocation Authority, a civilian agency created by Roosevelt; and others as federal prisons, where prisoners of war were held in isolation.
    The camp at Crystal City would be the largest INS camp, used to intern a wide variety of prisoners of war, including Germans, Japanese, and Italians, from the United States and thirteen Latin American countries—and their wives and children, many born in America. Many of these men were leaders in their respective communities—Buddhist and Shinto priests, German and Japanese businessmen, men of great wealth and influence from Peru, Bolivia, Honduras, Panama, and other Latin American countries. All of these enemy aliens had been separated from their bewildered families upon their arrest.
    In Harrison’s mind, the need for a camp to reunite families was a humanitarian step, one of many reforms he hoped to make as commissioner. He had his hands full, especially with the Latin American phase of the internment.In 1938, Roosevelt became convinced that in the event of war, Axis nationals living in Latin America would engage in pro-Axis propaganda and espionage. In October1941 the State Department had reached secret agreements with Panama,