Crystal City Pilgrimage - October 9-12, 2025

Crystal City Pilgrimage Committee is preparing registration materials for the 2025 pilgrimage, taking place October 9-12.

Please check back after May 1 for registration and additional details on the 2025 pilgrimage program.

The 2025 Crystal City Pilgrimage is scheduled to take place October 9-12 in Texas. Organized under the central theme of “Neighbors Not Enemies” in a time of renewed anti-immigrant rhetoric, this year’s pilgrimage honors the memory of the men, women, and children imprisoned in the WWII Department of Justice (DOJ) Crystal City Family Internment Camp – some of whom were arrested as a result of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Organized by the volunteer-led Crystal City Pilgrimage Committee, the program will feature an opportunity to stamp the Ireicho Book of Names, and a tour of the My Story Museum – a local history museum featuring the first permanent exhibit dedicated to the wartime incarceration in Crystal City. Pilgrimage events will be held in San Antonio, where conference style presentations will be given, and includes a day-trip to Crystal City, where participants will visit the confinement site and My Story Museum. 

What makes this pilgrimage so special? Crystal City is the only current pilgrimage to a DOJ detention site where Japanese Americans, and Japanese Latin Americans were held from 1942-1948. As a DOJ site, it housed “noncitizen” families of Japanese, German, and Italian ancestry who the FBI and Naval Intelligence began arresting in the days and weeks after the Attack on Pearl Harbor under the Alien Enemies Act. Dispersed across the country in one of several dozen confinement sites administered by DOJ, Army, or Immigration Naturalization Service, these incarcerees were later able to apply for transfer to Crystal City, where they would be reunited with their families. However, in order to join their loved ones in Crystal City, Japanese Americans incarcerated in the War Relocation Authority Camps had to first consent to deportation.

Not only did Crystal City hold close to a thousand Germans and a handful of Italian nationals, the site was also unique because it was where so-called “enemy aliens” from Latin America were held. As part of a planned prisoner-of-war exchange, the US federal government orchestrated the kidnapping and deportation of Japanese, German, and Italian community leaders from Latin America. Those with families were sent to Crystal City, including more than 2,000 Japanese Peruvians and other Latinx Nikkei. Many renunciants from Tule Lake and other American concentration camps were later sent to Crystal City. The Alien Enemies Act, invoked by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, provided the legal precedent for all of this. Crystal City Pilgrimage Committee, along with Tsuru for Solidarity and the JACL, condemn the unlawful invocation of the Alien Enemies Act under the current administration.

Participants in the Crystal City Pilgrimage will learn more about our unique history and how it links to today’s immigration and human rights struggle. Docents from the local community will lead participants on bus tours of the confinement site. A memorial program is planned with the participation of local Crystal City residents at the site monument, located where two Japanese Peruvian girls tragically drowned in 1944. Attendees will also get to visit My Story Museum, which features the camp exhibit titled America’s Last WWII Concentration Camp, in addition to exhibits on the Chicano Movement in Zavala County, 1969 Crystal City student walkouts, and stories of local veterans.