Tomi Okano was 6 years old in 1942 when she and her family were forced by the US government to leave their Oregon home to live in a World War II detention camp for Americans of Japanese ancestry.
More than 60 years later, she has few vivid memories of this place in the southern Idaho desert, save one.
"I remember the fence," Okano said Saturday as she walked past the remnants of an entry checkpoint to the former 13,350-hectare Minidoka Relocation Center compound.
"I remember thinking if I could just go over that fence and over those mountains, there would be the ocean and I would be home," she said.
Okano, of Seattle, was one of about 100 former detainees and their families who made a pilgrimage from Seattle and Portland, Oregon, to the Idaho camp that is now designated the Minidoka Internment National Monument.
The National Park Service hosted the visit with the former internees to discuss its plans to develop a 30 hectare parcel set aside in 2001 by former president Bill Clinton into an educational exhibit focusing on civil rights and the wartime experience of Japanese Americans.
Minidoka was one of 10 detention camps operated between 1942 and 1946 in the western US and Arkansas. The camps held thousands of West Coast residents who were deemed a security risk because they had at least one-16th Japanese ancestry.
The forced removal of Japanese Americans from the coastal "military exclusion area" was ordered by president Franklin Roosevelt two months after Japan's Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
Minidoka residents lived in dozens of tarpaper-covered barracks and worked on irrigation projects and farms.
"This was the site of some very dark days in our nation's history," said Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho.
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