Welcome to the Twin Cities Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). JACL is a national membership organization whose mission is to secure and maintain the human and civil rights of Americans victimized by injustice.
JACL derives its effectiveness through its strategically located regional offices, which serve the needs of the organization’s members and help maintain the well-being of all Americans.
In addition to its national headquarters in San Francisco, the JACL has regional offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Washington D.C.
The Pacific Citizen, publishing news and information for and about the Asian American community since 1929, is a production of the JACL Los Angeles office.
2023 – A Year In Review
JACL National Convention 2023
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The new travel ban is part of a long and troubling history of restricting immigration based on race and nationality. From early attempts at excluding Asian immigrants to Trump’s previous Muslim Ban, history shows how these restrictions are often driven by racist and xenophobic stereotypes rather than any real threat.![]()
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The country’s first restrictive immigration law, the Page Act of 1875, banned Chinese “coolie” labor — though enforcement largely focused on prohibiting the entry of Chinese women to the United States based on the racist and sexist assumption that all were sex workers. Five years later, the Chinese Exclusion Act closed the borders to all Chinese immigrants. ![]()
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As U.S. labor recruiters turned to Japan as a source of cheap, exploitable labor, a familiar backlash emerged. The 1907 “Gentlemen’s Agreement” between the U.S. and Japan barred Japanese laborers, and in 1917 the “Asiatic Barred Zone Act” banned migration from much of Asia. ![]()
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But it didn’t stop there. The Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, was a nativist response to increased immigration from “undesirable” countries. Its primary target was Jews, Italians, Slavs, and Greeks — but West Coast politicians used it as an opportunity to solve the so-called “Japanese Problem.” The Act established a national origins quota for the first time, imposing strict limits on immigration from Asia or Eastern and Southern Europe. It also created an outright ban on Japanese immigration. ![]()
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Immigration bans have always been about weaponizing nationalist fears to label entire groups of people as a threat. Today’s travel ban, along with mass deportations and migrant detention, are rooted in a long history of racism and xenophobia masquerading as “national security.” We must recognize these bans for what they are: a legacy of exclusion that threatens our civil rights and the foundations of our democracy. This history serves as both a warning and a call to action.![]()
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Image descriptions: Six slides with the same text as above, along with photos and documents of early Chinese and Japanese immigrants entering the United States and images from protests against the Muslim Ban.
www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2025/06/18/trump-administration-impact-books-reading/8...
Trump administration could change the way we read, from book bans to author talks
www.usatoday.com
Policies from the Trump administration are already impacting readers, publishers and authors – and could continue given grant cuts and DEI reversals.
Posted @withregram • @tsuruforsolidarity Over the past week, we have seen the culmination of years of increasingly militarized immigration enforcement operations — a deliberate targeting of immigrants continues to ramp up and expand into workplaces, courthouses, and outside schools through an incentivized system that racially profiles and disappears people into a deadly detention system.![]()
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Community and elected leaders are warning that we are on a trajectory towards a normalized state of violent martial occupation and dissolution of the rule of law.![]()
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People in Los Angeles and in cities across the country are rising up in anger and frustration to protest the invasion of their communities by ICE and federal forces who have come to arrest neighbors, families and friends. In response to community resistance, the federal government ordered the National Guard and Marines to deploy alongside federal agents, escalating a tense situation and provoking confrontation with state governments and citizenry.![]()
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As Japanese Americans, we know all too well what it feels like to be a community treated as an internal enemy: occupied, policed, restricted, and removed by our own nation’s military. We know where this leads if left unchecked: curfews, mass roundups, martial law, separation of families, indefinite detention and the wholesale loss of civil liberties and human rights. Today, the technology of repression and removal may be different — airplanes instead of trains, AI-driven databases instead of paper census maps — but the dangers are familiar.![]()
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This is a defining moment for each one of us. What kind of ancestors will we be in this moment? What will we do to protect our communities and build the future that we want for our children and grandchildren. (1/2)
Posted @withregram • @mprnews Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were fatally shot Saturday morning at their home in Brooklyn Park in what Gov. Tim Walz said “appears to be a politically motivated assassination.”![]()
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“Our state lost a great leader, and I lost the dearest of friends,” Walz said at a news conference just before 10 a.m. “Speaker Hortman was someone who served the people of Minnesota with grace, compassion, humor and a sense of service.”![]()
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Walz said another Democratic lawmaker, state Sen. John Hoffman, and his wife Yvette, were also shot at their home in Champlin. They were out of surgery, Walz said, and “we are cautiously optimistic they will survive this assassination attempt.”![]()
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As of mid-morning, officials were still searching for the suspect in the shootings, who authorities said was impersonating a law enforcement officer.![]()
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This is a developing news story. Go to mprnews.org for the latest.![]()
@mprnews
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