The NVC Executive Council is aware of some influential voices promising to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 – the same legislation used to justify the incarceration of Japanese American citizens without legal due process during WWII. These same people are also drawing misleading parallels between Americans serving prison terms after being found guilty of well-documented crimes by juries of their peers, and Japanese American families forced into mass detention camps without being charged with any crimes.
NVC unequivocally refutes and condemns this false historical narrative in its entirety.
The distinction that makes these comparisons false and absurd is that the imprisoned Japanese American citizens were not charged with breaking any laws or committing any crimes before being forcibly removed from their homes and imprisoned.
Many Japanese American men of military age volunteered to enlist and fight in the United States Army at the start of WWII. Many volunteered even after being incarcerated. Drawing comparisons between the incarceration of Japanese American citizens and Americans serving prison sentences who were charged with specific crimes, provided access to legal counsel and due process, appeared in open court to be judged by fellow citizens, and found guilty of crimes including property theft, weapons-charges, assaulting, resisting or impeding law enforcement personnel, disrupting Congress, and seditious conspiracy against the United States of America, is misleading. The conduct on January 6, 2020, resulted in 140 police officers injured, one death, and several indirect deaths.
The Nisei Veterans Committee (NVC) was founded in 1946 by Japanese American military veterans who served in the 100th Infantry Battalion, 442nd Regimental Combat Team (the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in the history of the US military), the Military Intelligence Service (credited with saving countless Allied lives and shortening the war in the Pacific by two years), and other non-segregated units (e.g., 101st Airborne Division and 82nd Airborne Division). NVC membership includes military veterans from WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Shield/Storm, the Global War on Terror (GWOT), and their communities.
NVC is committed to protect the American way of life as set forth by the Constitution of the United States and to preserve, perpetuate, and share the historical legacy of the Japanese American soldiers of WWII.