Washington – Notorious internment camps where Japanese-Americans were kept behind barbed wire during World War II, including one in Colorado, will be preserved as stark reminders of how the United States turned on some of its citizens in a time of fear.
As one of its last acts, the Republican-led Congress on Tuesday sent President Bush legislation establishing a $38 million program of National Park Service grants to restore and pay for research at 10 camps where the government sent people of Japanese descent after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
One such camp is the Amache Internment Camp in Granada, on Colorado’s Eastern Plains east of Lamar. It was operated from August 1942 to October 1945.
On another issue, the House postponed a showdown vote on opening 8 million more acres in the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling.
Supporters were worried about achieving the two-thirds supermajority needed to pass the measure under rules allowing little debate. They said they might make another attempt before week’s end using different rules that allow broader debate but require only a simple majority.
Lawmakers returned Tuesday for only four days of work before Republicans call it quits after running Congress for 12 years.
Democrats will control both houses for the first time since 1994 when a new Congress reflecting last month’s election starts up in January.
Republicans already have left the biggest unfinished tasks of 2006 – approving budgets for most federal agencies – to their successors.
Leaders in both parties, however, still have hopes of renewing three popular tax breaks before leaving town. They include $4,000 deductions for college students, a sales-tax credit in states without their own income taxes, and business research and development credits. All expired last December.
As for the Japanese-American internment sites, the National Park Service already operates facilities at two of the 10: the Manzanar National Historic Site in California and the Minidoka Internment National Monument in Idaho. The money in the bill the House passed Tuesday on a voice vote and sent to Bush would go to them and eight others, to be operated by state and local governments or organizations.
The Senate passed the bill last month. The Park Service says the program is too expensive, but the White House has not signaled opposition to it.
“Preserving these internment sites is a solemn task we all bear,” said Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Calif., who was born in the Potson camp in Arizona in 1944. “Those who come after us will have a physical reminder of what they will never allow to happen again.”
The camps housed more than 120,000 Japanese-American U.S. citizens and residents under an executive order signed by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1942.
At the time, there were fears that Japanese-Americans were loyal to Japan, and Roosevelt’s order prohibited such people from living on the West Coast.
