With his election to a second term in office, President Donald Trump has moved swiftly to target immigrants, people of color, and the very idea of birthright citizenship. As a result, over the past year Americans have witnessed a dramatic erosion of civil liberties and the rule of law, both of which have particularly targeted vulnerable immigrant communities and communities of color.
This panel will address the parallels between rationales that served to justify historic discrimination against Asian Americans and present policies and practices of the Trump Administration that have resulted in racial profiling and the arrest, detention, incarceration, and deportation of new others. It will also discuss the Supreme Court’s frightening deference to the Trump Administration's ever-expanding claims of executive power, resulting in the failure of our constitutional system of checks and balances.
Our panel features scholars in legal and cultural studies who will share their expertise on the legacies of anti-Asian racism on the American legal system -- Lorraine Bannai, a member of the team that successfully reopened Fred Korematsu's wartime case and academic whose work has focused on the law and the Japanese American incarceration, will speak about the connection between the WWII and coram nobis cases and issues today; Gabriel Jack Chin, an expert on civil rights law and the history of anti-Asian racism, will offer clarity on the erosion of the rule of law and the attacks on universities under the Trump Regime; and Frank Abe, a cultural historian and writer, will connect the current abuses of governmental authority to the historical precedents documented in the graphic novel We Hereby Refuse, and the Penguin Classics anthology of The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration. Jonathan van Harmelen, a historian of American political history who writes about Japanese American history, will serve as moderator for this panel.