The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange by Jan Jarboe Russell Page B
Authors: Jan Jarboe Russell
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Peru, Guatemala, and the other countries in Latin America to restrict Axis nationals living in their countries and to prepare for their arrest and deportation. The FBI station agents, known as legal attachés, were stationed at US embassies throughout Latin America. 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, which had their own internment camps, 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. Those arrangements had been made by the Special War Problems Division of the Department of State. The justification for the arrests, from the point of view of the United States, was to protect national security. The media reported nothing about the deportations. Some of the countries—including Peru, which arrested 702 Germans, 1,799 Japanese, and 49 Italians—deported Axis citizens for economic motives. In return for delivering Axis nationals to the United States, the governments seized their homes, businesses, and bank accounts.
Once the Latin Americans set foot on American soil in ports in New Orleans or California, the INS was in charge. Officers arrested them for “illegal entry.” They were deloused with strong showers, sprayed with DDT, and loaded on trains bound for internment camps. Jerre Mangione, an Italian American writer who worked for Harrison at the INS and helped decide where to locate the family camp, later wrote in a memoir about why Latin Americans were deported to the United States: “The rationale for this international form of kidnapping was that by immobilizing influential German and Japanese nationals who might 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 itsown security.” According to Mangione, many in the INS, including himself, opposed the arrest of Latin Americans. One of the officers in charge of an INS camp told Mangione, “Only in wartime could we get away with such fancy skulduggery.”
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 Geneva Convention protocols that dictate treatment of prisoners of war, but the policy of the US government was that the treatment of enemy aliens should follow the principles of the convention. In most US internment camps the principles were loosely applied. In a manual he wrote for INS officers Harrison insisted that INS “humanize” immigration laws. “Immigration laws often appear to work a hardship on aliens. Officers can humanize these laws at the same time carrying out the intent of Congress and the will of the people. Officers should always keep in mind that their decisions may spell future happiness or despair for those affected by such decisions.”
With Harrison in Crystal City that day were two other people, Willard F. Kelly, Harrison’s number two man, who served as assistant commissioner for alien control, and Dr. Amy Stannard, the officer in charge of the INS internment camp in Seagoville, Texas, a small town near Dallas. Stannard was the incarnation of Rosie the Riveter, a wartime symbol on posters of a woman laborer performing what previously was a man’s work. A graduate of the University of California medical school with a specialty in psychiatry, Stannard was the only woman in charge of an internment camp, or any type of POW camp, during the war. The Seagoville camp opened in 1941 as a
Once the Latin Americans set foot on American soil in ports in New Orleans or California, the INS was in charge. Officers arrested them for “illegal entry.” They were deloused with strong showers, sprayed with DDT, and loaded on trains bound for internment camps. Jerre Mangione, an Italian American writer who worked for Harrison at the INS and helped decide where to locate the family camp, later wrote in a memoir about why Latin Americans were deported to the United States: “The rationale for this international form of kidnapping was that by immobilizing influential German and Japanese nationals who might 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 itsown security.” According to Mangione, many in the INS, including himself, opposed the arrest of Latin Americans. One of the officers in charge of an INS camp told Mangione, “Only in wartime could we get away with such fancy skulduggery.”
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 Geneva Convention protocols that dictate treatment of prisoners of war, but the policy of the US government was that the treatment of enemy aliens should follow the principles of the convention. In most US internment camps the principles were loosely applied. In a manual he wrote for INS officers Harrison insisted that INS “humanize” immigration laws. “Immigration laws often appear to work a hardship on aliens. Officers can humanize these laws at the same time carrying out the intent of Congress and the will of the people. Officers should always keep in mind that their decisions may spell future happiness or despair for those affected by such decisions.”
With Harrison in Crystal City that day were two other people, Willard F. Kelly, Harrison’s number two man, who served as assistant commissioner for alien control, and Dr. Amy Stannard, the officer in charge of the INS internment camp in Seagoville, Texas, a small town near Dallas. Stannard was the incarnation of Rosie the Riveter, a wartime symbol on posters of a woman laborer performing what previously was a man’s work. A graduate of the University of California medical school with a specialty in psychiatry, Stannard was the only woman in charge of an internment camp, or any type of POW camp, during the war. The Seagoville camp opened in 1941 as a
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