<\/a>Speakers in Juneau host a rally denouncing immigrant detention facilities Friday, July 12, 2019. (Michael Penn | Juneau Empire)<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t
For Betty Marriott, the issue hits close to home. When she was 2 years old, she was sent with her family to a Japanese internment camp in Idaho, she said in an interview before the vigil.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
She pointed to her with pictures of people in Japanese internment camps in 1942 comparing it to pictures of the immigrant detention camps at the Mexican border that said, “WRONG THEN, WRONG NOW.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
“My parents had three days notice to get out of Seattle,” she said. “We were housed in a temporary place while the concentration camps were being constructed in Idaho. … We had to live in horse stalls.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
But she said this still wasn’t as bad as the camps at the border, because she was with her family and the horse stalls had cots. Many of the children at the border have been separated from their parents, some who are not even a year old.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
“We weren’t separated from our parents,” she said. “It just breaks my heart to see this happening to children.”<\/p>\n
<\/a>A crowd denouncing immigrant detention facilities pose for a picture at Mayor Bill Overstreet Park, Friday, July 12, 2019. (Michael Penn | Juneau Empire)<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t
People attending the event signed letters to U.S. Sens. Dan Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and passed around buckets to raise money for RAICES, an organization that provides free legal services to people seeking asylum at the border. A series of speakers hosted the rally, notably an original song performed and written by Emily Mesch<\/a>.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t “Queremos vivir,” she sang, which in English means, “We want to live.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t \u2022 Mollie Barnes is a freelance reporter in Juneau.<\/b><\/p>\n\t\t\t\t “Lights for Liberty.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":50592,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[75],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-50588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-news","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50588"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=50588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t
<\/p>\n\t\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"