“The Terror: Infamy” star George Takei is a survivor of Japanese-American internment during World War II, but the actor says the current situation at the southern U.S. border is “a new grotesque low” for the country.
“What we have is this endless cycle, a repetition of this kind of horror and injustice being inflicted on minority people,” the actor said at the Television Critics Association press tour on Thursday. “We have reached a new grotesque low.”
Takei, who was five years old when his family was interned, referred to current news reports of young children being separated from their parents and sent to live in facilities in distant parts of the country.
“Our families were left intact, but what we see today is this incredible inhumanity of children being torn away from their families and some being scattered to the outer reaches of America,” he said. “This administration is so incompetent that they couldn’t put them [back] together, and so I hope this show will remind people that it is still existing today.”
Showrunner Alexander Woo said the “The Terror: Infamy” was in development in early 2018, before the Trump administration’s immigration policy came to dominate the news, but he believes the story would be relevant no matter when it was told.
“The story of internment would be relevant in almost any context, because it speaks to an immigrant experience,” Woo said. “That was relevant 30 years ago and it probably will be relevant 100 years from now.”
He continued, “The fact that we are at this moment in our history, makes this particularly relevant, but George has been working to bring awareness to this story for decades because there is a lesson to be learned.”