Buddhists Resisting Child Concentration Camps
Protests at Trump Administration Concentration Camps have ramped up in in recent weeks, and they are starting to have an impact. On July 24th, just four days after a group of several hundred protestors blocked the doors to a proposed camp in Fort Still, Oklahoma, U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe announced that plans to house migrant children at the facility had been put on hold.
Among the protestors at the July action were Rev. Duncan Ryuken Williams and twenty five other Buddhist clergy and lay leaders. In addition, Rev. Williams brought over 4,000 paper cranes made by Buddhist sanghas and individuals. The paper cranes, a symbol of hope and transformation in Japanese culture, offered a link between the Japanese Americans who were interned at Fort Still during WWII and the efforts to block another concentration camp from being formed there today.
About the experience, Rev. Williams wrote the following:
Multi-layered Buddhist robes are not usually worn in 102-degree heat or advisable for marching down a two-lane highway in front of a U.S. Army base, but it felt perfectly fitting to wear them despite such conditions on July 20, 2019 in Lawton, Oklahoma. On this day, a group of 25 Buddhist priests and lay leaders donned their robes and marched with nearly 400 other protestors –including members of a Japanese American organization, Tsuru for Solidarity,that had invited us –towards a fence in front of the Bentley Gate at the Fort Sill Army Base.
We Buddhists walked the highway hoping not to get arrested before we could fulfill our responsibility to the day’s direct action by chanting a Buddhist sutra as close to that fence as possible. A fence that was the site of two shootings of Japanese immigrants by U.S. Army guards at the WWII Fort Sill Internment Camp and a fence that was also slated to demarcate the confinement site of up to 1,400 asylum-seeking children from Central America, who have been separated from their families.
To read more of this beautiful essay, go here. Many blessings to Rev. Williams and all who were there on July 20th to help block further injustices toward migrant children and their families.