A US Border Patrol agent stands in entrance of the Japanese American Nationwide Museum in Los Angeles on August 14, 2025. (photograph courtesy Little Tokyo Speedy Response Community through JANM)
A spokesperson for JANM instructed Hyperallergic that roughly 75 United States Customs and Border Patrol brokers confirmed as much as the establishment’s Norman Y. Mineta Democracy Plaza, which is publicly accessible.
“We are outraged and deeply distressed that armed federal agents came onto our campus — making arrests on the very ground where, in 1942, Japanese American families were forced to board buses bound for concentration camps,” JANM President and CEO Ann Burroughs stated within the assertion, shared with Hyperallergic.
“The parallels are stark: entire communities were forcibly removed from the West Coast in 1942 and today our immigrant brothers and sisters face the terror of ICE and CBP raids across the country. It was a miscarriage of justice then, and it is a miscarriage of justice now,” Burroughs continued.

Brokers had been seen within the museum’s public-facing plaza beneath a Rubik’s Dice-inspired sculpture, “OOMO Cube” (2014). (photograph courtesy JANM)
The JANM spokesperson instructed Hyperallergic that the museum would proceed to observe the legislation and its current insurance policies, together with “requiring a judicial warrant to access private spaces” if any additional operations occurred.
“Our law enforcement operations are about enforcing the law,” McLaughlin wrote, replying to a video of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass positing that the brokers had been there as an act of political intimidation on the highly-publicized occasion.
Isa Farfan is a employees reporter for Hyperallergic. In Might 2024, she graduated from Barnard Faculty, the place she studied Political Science and English and served because the Columbia Day by day Spectator’s Arts &…
Extra by Isa Farfan

