Star Trek’s Takei Compares US Japanese Internment Camps To Trump Detaining Illegal Immigrants

AUDIE CORNISH: You have a president who is now saying he's carrying out mass deportations because it's popular. Or saying that he has popular support for going after undocumented migrants. And it made me think, as I was reading your book, about the fact that a majority of Americans at the time, in the '40s, supported the removal of Japanese Americans. And so, how does your experience of that inform your thinking of the way the president is saying now; that there's somehow there are, at times, popular support for these kinds of actions?

TAKEI: The important thing and my father taught me this when I was a teenager. I had many, many after dinner conversations. People, Americans need to speak out. We were a small minority and cowed, really, under the force, the huge tidal-wave force against us. And Japanese Americans, when you have rifles with bayonets pointed at you. And I, as a 5-year-old, I saw a bayonet pointed at my father right at our front door. I was terrified, and I'll never forget that. But politicians lie, and people believe that lie because there's hysteria rampant at that time and in our time today right now.