Crystal City Family Internment Camp Site

The Crystal City Family Internment Camp opened in December 1942 on land the Farm Security Administration had bought at the edge of town. It was the only camp run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service for families. Men arrested as enemy aliens were often held in other camps first; wives and children, many of them United States citizens, asked to be interned to be with them. The first internees were Germans, arriving December 12, 1942. Japanese Americans came from March 17, 1943, many by train to Uvalde and then by bus.

Latin America was part of the story. The United States worked with 15 countries to round up people of Japanese, German and Italian descent, took their passports on the way north, and declared them illegal aliens on arrival. Historians and former internees have called it hostage shopping, because the detainees were exchanged for Americans held abroad. Behind a ten-foot barbed-wire fence were cottages, huts, three school systems (American, Japanese and German) and a circular pool 250 feet across, built by German internees on a drained swamp.

The camp closed on February 27, 1948, and Crystal City schools were later built over much of it. What remains is modest: the pool, the foundations of six cottages and part of the Japanese elementary school, with a state marker and interpretive panels. The grounds belong to the school district, so ask first at the Crystal City Memorial Public Library, which also has the free brochure. My Story Museum, about a mile away, tells the camp's story with photographs.