Addison Powell, Ryan Anderson, and Nyam Clark E. Hone present "Behind Barbed Wire," a documentary detailing the 1942 Japanese American internment of 120,000 people under Executive Order 9066. The film exposes dehumanized camp conditions, property losses, and the statelessness of citizens like the narrator's mother, who lost her rights until 1959. By drawing parallels between post-WWII FBI raids and modern Trump-era immigration enforcement involving over 66,000 detainees, the segment argues that wartime hatred drives civil liberties violations, warning that such injustices must never recur. [Automatically generated summary]
Understanding that the children of the newly freed slaves have the requisite allegiance to the United States.
This was all about overruling the grave injustice of Dred Scott and making sure that that allegiance was granted to the children of slaves.
However, you have this contrast of a very, very strong, impressive consensus, both in the original understanding, in the congressional debates, and carrying over into commentators for 50 years afterwards that the children of temporary sojourners are not covered.
And for those reasons, we ask the court to reverse.
Thank you, counsel.
General, the case is submitted.
This year, as we mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, C-SPAN's Student CAM documentary competition invited students to create short films exploring themes from American history, the rights and freedoms rooted in this founding document, and pressing issues of today, from the economy and immigration to criminal justice, education, and health care.
Nearly 4,000 students from 38 states and Washington, D.C. took part in this year's competition.
Throughout this month, we're proud to showcase our top 21 winners.
This year's second prize middle school winners are Addison Powell, Ryan Anderson, and Nyam Clark E. Hone, seventh graders from Community Montessori in Escondido, California, where C SPAN is available through Cox Communications.
Their winning documentary is titled Behind Barbed Wire about Japanese internment during World War II and the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and happiness.
We hold these truths to be self evident.
That all men are created equal.
That they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
That among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
In 1942, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, allowing 120,000 Japanese Americans to be ordered out of their homes and taken to one of 10 internment camps in the U.S. My parents said, Do as the government told us, because if we don't, it could be bad.
So we did exactly what the government told us to do.
Packed up and go and let them take care of us.
I still remember how scary that bang was, very loud.
And my father answered it, and we were ordered out of our home.
My father gave us little packages to carry, and my brother and I stood out on the driveway waiting for my mother to come out.
And when she finally emerged, she had our baby sister in one arm and a huge duffel bag in the other, and tears were streaming down her face.
Over the course of history, the United States government has imprisoned people that have come from different countries due to war or just because of their status as enemy aliens.
What the U.S. government has done has caused lots of prejudice across the nation.
When we got the order that we had to move, it was in 1942.
Since we had to get ready to leave in a week, we tried to sell everything in our house, but we couldn't.
So the postman came by and said, He'll take care of our.
Things for us.
And then we gave our pet dog to our neighbors because we didn't know if we would ever be able to come home.
We didn't know where we were going.
We didn't know where they were going to send us.
We got into the banks of trucks and put into the prison camp, the barrack was terrible no electricity, no water.
The dirt was brown.
Our barracks were black, and the sky was always gray.
So it looks like for three years, all we saw was black, brown, and gray.
So the FBI and the government started raids upon individuals in their homes immediately after World War II.
And these individuals, many of them, are taken away for no reason, not even told where they're being taken to and why they were taken to.
And many of these were swept away in these actions, much like ICE is doing nowadays, because simply raiding people's homes.
Today, Trump has locked up an unprecedented 66,000 people in the most dehumanized conditions in his push for mass deportations of immigrants of every status, a number that will only continue to skyrocket.
This all started because some people hated the Japanese people and wanted to get rid of Japanese people from the coast.
Saying that in times of war, almost anything you can do to. to violate principles and so forth are necessary to fight a successful war.
And this argument is sometimes being used now today by the Trump administration and sort of arguing that there's a war on immigration or something, and that therefore the United States can do everything it can legally and constitutionally to fight that war.
And that means taking extreme measures in terms of limiting the civil liberties of individuals in the United States, talking once again about stripping American citizens of their rights.
My mother, who was a citizen of the United States by birth, but eventually lost her citizenship in the camps, because she was forced to renounce her U.s citizenship, as many people were.
When they found out at the end of the war there was nothing to go back to Japan to, they decided to stay in the United States, left my mother with a dilemma.
That she had renounced her U.s citizenship, she did not have a Japanese citizenship so until 1959, until it was finally resolved, she was a person without a country.
She was not a U.s citizen, nor a Japanese citizen for that period of time.
It should never have happened.
It should never happen again To anyone, and hopefully it will never happen Again.
We all have to be so very careful to be kind to one another.
I think that's the basic thing.
There is a song in South Pacific that says, You have got to be taught to hate, and you have to be carefully taught by the time you are six, seven, and eight.
This is the great fear that what was done during World War II could be done again.
And it's only the public's awareness and understanding and their support of the mistakes that were done during World War II, the errors that were done during World War II, and the lessons of World War II that this is something that should not be allowed to stand again against any population.
And the United States was wrong in doing so in 1941 after Pearl Harbor to respond this way, and the United States would be wrong to do so in the current period of time.
C-SPAN Book TV Preview00:02:33
Be sure to watch all of the winning entries on our website at studentcam.org.
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Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend.
At 4 30 p.m. Eastern, the Tucson Festival of Books with best selling authors including Jonathan Turley, Jacob Soboroff, and John Carl.
And then at 7 p.m. Eastern, it's America's Book Club.
Host David Rubenstein sits down with Yale University professor and J. Edgar Hoover biographer Beverly Gage to discuss her career and new release, This Land Is Your Land.
And later, 10 30 p.m. Eastern, as Christians around the world observe Easter Sunday, political scientist Charles Murray talks about his decades long conversion from happy agnostic to becoming a Christian in taking religion seriously.
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