POWELL, Wyo. — The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation released the following statement on Nov. 20.
The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation exists because in 1942, government leaders decided without evidence that Japanese Americans posed a national security threat and needed to be forced from their homes and put in a series of incarceration sites around the country, including at our location in northwestern Wyoming.
All that needed to happen was for a handful of federal officials to decide that 125,000 Japanese Americans were potential terrorists and thereby deserving of being imprisoned without trial. Many of our ancestors lost everything. It was such an abuse that Congress and President Ronald Reagan decided in 1988 that the government needed to apologize and compensate survivors for part of their losses.
This history is why HMWF and its members are so worried about H.R. 9495, which could come up for another vote this week. The bill as written would let the Treasury secretary label organizations as “terrorist-affiliated” without due process and cause them to lose their tax-exempt status. In McCulloch v. Maryland, Chief Justice John Marshall noted that the power to tax was also the power to destroy, and losing tax-exempt status would wreck many nonprofit organizations.
We are grateful for the support we’ve received from Wyoming’s congressional delegation and from Congress as a whole, whether it was creating the Japanese American Confinement Education Act or passing the 1988 Civil Liberties Act. Wyoming’s delegation has long supported our foundation and the work it does, fully realizing that telling this difficult history is often controversial. We work hard to bring visitors to Wyoming, and our events lead to money being spent in our communities.
We hope Congress will carefully examine H.R. 9495 and determine that it goes too far and needs to be rejected.
The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, a Smithsonian affiliate, preserves the site where some 14,000 Japanese Americans were unjustly incarcerated in Wyoming from 1942 through 1945. Their stories are told within the foundation’s museum, Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, located between Cody and Powell. For more information, call the center at (307) 754-8000 or email [email protected].