TACOMA, Wash. My 95-year-old grandfather, Homer Yasui, has never been one to dwell on trauma. Hes tough and blunt and funny, and as the keeper of our family history, hes described his incarceration matter-of-factly many times: how the FBI took his father away on Dec. 12, 1941, five days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and how the government ultimately sent his family to a concentration camp.

Its rare that he reveals any pain over what he and the rest of his family went through. But hes outraged now as he watches history repeat itself.

Imagine putting immigrant children in a prison because their parents brought them to the United States perhaps illegally, he said. Throw em in jail? This is supposed to be a country of refuge and salvation and asylum, and here were treating them like criminals and putting people in jail!

Thats why last Sunday morning, as black clouds loomed in the south and the weather forecast predicted sheets of rain all day, he donned his Tsuru for Solidarity T-shirt and dressed head to toe in black I look like a ninja, he joked to go to a protest outside the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington.

At the detention center, a handful of volunteers set up tents and hung paper cranes tsuru, as theyre known in Japanese on the cyclone fence. Each colorful strand of paper birds was tucked into a plastic bag to protect it from the elements. In Japan, its believed that folding 1,000 cranes will make ones wish come true. For Japanese American activists, the cranes are a reminder of their history and an expression of solidarity with communities experiencing racist incarceration today.

Despite the unpromising weather, a crowd of about 400 people would soon show up for one of the first big actions organized by the Seattle chapter of Tsuru for Solidarity, a project led by Japanese Americans calling for an end to immigrant detention and incarceration. On June 6, Tsuru delegations from around the country will converge in Washington, D.C., with 126,000 paper cranes representing the number of people of Japanese ancestry incarcerated in the U.S. during World War II to stage a massive demonstration calling for closure of the immigrant detention camps and an end to the Trump administrations targeting of immigrant communities through mass arrests, family separation, detention and deportation.

My grandfather hopes to be among them. After all, he experienced incarceration and family separation firsthand. Like other Japanese immigrant men enemy aliens who were influential in their communities, my great-grandfather, Masuo, was apprehended suddenly , without explanation, and denied legal representation. He never had a trial.