‘Worse than the internment camps’: ‘Star Trek’ actor George Takei slams Donald Trump’s ‘horrifying’ immigration policy
Takei, 81, who played Sulu in the original ‘Star Trek’ series, says the policy of dividing immigrant families is even worse than the Japanese internment camps he experienced as a child
Actor George Takei has slammed US President Donald Trump’s policy of separating migrant families, including asylum seekers, and putting their children in holding camps, saying that the system is worse than the internment camps for Japanese-Americans he experienced as a child.
The 81-year-old, best known for playing helmsman Sulu in the 1960s Star Trek series, wrote in an editorial for Foreign Policy that “it is hard to describe the terror and anxiety” created by a “capricious” government, as “the only people with the power to help have trained their guns and dogs upon you. You are without rights, held without charge or trial. The world is upside down, information-less, and indifferent or even hostile to your plight.
“And yet, with hideous irony, I can still say, ‘At least during the internment …’”
In 1942, after America had entered the second world war following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour, a five-year-old Takei – a Los Angeles native – was taken with his parents by US authorities and placed in a series of internment camps, the first of which was simply a converted horse stable.
Takei, who turned his traumatic memories into the musical Allegiance, writes in the Foreign Policy piece that his parents were able to “put themselves between us and the horror … so that we would never fully appreciate the grim reality of the mosquito-infested swamp into which we had been thrown”.