The Health and Human Services Department announced yesterday that it plans to use Fort Sill in Oklahoma as a shelter for unaccompanied migrant minors, a temporary measure prompted by a full-blown humanitarian crisis at the border. Most media outlets covered the news with the appropriate level of nuance, but a few, uh, didn’t. The real story, as they saw it, was “TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TO SEND MIGRANT CHILDREN TO FORMER JAPANESE INTERNMENT CAMP!!!!”
The outlet that got the talking point rolling, as best as I can tell, was TIME Magazine, who headlined their piece “Trump Administration to Hold Migrant Children at Base That Served as WWII Japanese Internment Camp.” The Daily Beast, The Hill, HuffPost, and Rolling Stone all ran with similar headlines, while CBS News made reference to Japanese internment in the body of the piece.
Fort Sill was indeed a former Japanese internment camp, by the virtue of the fact that it has been a continuously operating Army base for 150 years and the Army was involved in Japanese internment. But as with American history in general, that represents a small sliver of the fort’s history. It housed and trained soldiers in every major U.S. war since the Civil War, including the “Buffalo Soldiers,” the highly-regarded African-American calvary regiments. It was a key outpost during the Indian Wars, and boasts of being the birthplace of U.S. Army combat aviation. Geronimo is buried there (sans his skull, supposedly, thanks to Dubya’s granddad). Mel Brooks lived there. So did Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Today Fort Sill is a National Historical Landmark, houses the U.S. Army Field Artillery School, and maintains a population of more than 75,000 troops, families, and civilians.
All of which is to say, distilling Fort Sill down to a “former Japanese internment camp” is ridiculous, and arguably tars thousands of current and former servicemen with guilt by association. You might as well say “Donald Trump Lives In Building Where Japanese Internment Orders Were Signed.”
Per Lexis Nexis, there have been tens of thousands of mentions of “Fort Sill” in English language news sources in the past few decades, literally too many for the service to count. Exactly sixmentioned both “Fort Still” and “Japanese internment,” and all six stories were about Japanese internment. That Japanese internment is a defining moment in Fort Sill’s history, warranting prominent mention in stories even having nothing to do with Japanese internment, appears to be a notion born sometime in the past 24 hours, evidently by a reporter with an agenda, a deadline, and access to Wikipedia. – READ MORE