Descendants of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II stood in San José's Japantown last week and drew a straight line from that history to a low-slung building going up on farmland near Gilroy — a planned ICE facility that California and Santa Clara County are now racing to block in federal court before a September hearing.

The rally on July 29 fused two stories The Dissent has tracked separately: the moral memory of the WWII incarceration camps and the concrete legal fight over a proposed ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations site at 7240 Holsclaw Road, just outside Gilroy's city limits. Attorney General Rob Bonta and Santa Clara County sued in June to stop the project, ICE has agreed to pause construction while it answers the suit, and a hearing on a preliminary injunction has been moved up to September. The coalition's argument is that the injunction fight is not abstract — the county's own history is the warning label.

A Japanese American-led coalition of residents, faith leaders and elected officials gathered in San José's Japantown on July 29 to oppose a planned Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility near Gilroy, framing it as the latest turn on a road their own families have already traveled.

"When you see your government begin to sort human beings into categories of who deserves rights and who doesn't, who gets due process and who doesn't, you do not stay quiet," Rev. John Oda of Wesley United Methodist Church said, according to KQED, which covered the rally. Oda told the crowd his uncle died fighting for the United States while his family was held at the Heart Mountain concentration camp in Wyoming.

Susan Hayase, a co-founder of San José Nikkei Resisters who helped win redress and reparations for incarcerated Japanese Americans in the 1970s and '80s, said the survivors' charge to her generation was simple: never let it happen to anyone else. "It's too late to just say never again. The thing we feared is happening again now," she said.

The rally was the emotional front of a fight that is, at its core, a lawsuit. On June 10, Attorney General Rob Bonta and Santa Clara County Counsel Tony LoPresti filed suit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California seeking to permanently block construction of the facility, the Gilroy Dispatch reported. The complaint alleges the federal government advanced the project in secret on a 7240 Holsclaw Road parcel that has been protected for agricultural use since at least the 1960s — skipping environmental review and local consultation in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act, the Intergovernmental Cooperation Act, the Administrative Procedure Act and California's Williamson Act, which restricts non-agricultural development on farmland.

"Under this Administration, we've seen ICE offices have become mini-detention centers, despite being unequipped for long-term holding. That's unacceptable," Bonta said in a statement carried by the Dispatch. "So is the secrecy surrounding the details of this project."

ICE has told the Gilroy Dispatch the site is meant as office space, not a long-term detention center. Opponents dispute that. Rebeca Amendáriz, an organizer with the ICE Out of Gateway Coalition, told the paper that blueprints obtained by the group show a processing center built to hold up to 150 people for as long as two days, with training areas and weapons storage. "This isn't some benign administrative office," she said. "It's somewhere where people will be held, processed and transferred out" — potentially to detention centers in the Central Valley.

For now, the ground has gone quiet. As part of a scheduling agreement, ICE has voluntarily paused construction while federal attorneys prepare their response, and a hearing on the county and state's request for a preliminary injunction has been advanced to September. No injunction has been issued. "We didn't get an injunction, but I'll take it as a temporary win to halt that construction," Amendáriz said.

The opposition is broadening. The county says it now has 11 active cases against the Trump administration; multiple cities have signed onto an amicus brief backing the suit. At the Japantown rally, the coalition was joined by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, Assemblymembers Ash Kalra and Patrick Ahrens, Supervisor Betty Duong and San José Councilmember Anthony Tordillos.

"ICE is out of control," Lofgren said, per KQED. "If that detention center is opened…those masked, armed, dangerous agents can fan out across Northern California and bring their reign of terror to our communities. We cannot allow that to happen."

Whether they can allow it is now a question for a federal judge — and the answer is due within weeks.