TORRANCE, Calif. — Legend has it that if you fold 1,000 cranes, your wish will come true. 85-year-old Kanji Sahara and many Japanese Americans have folded more than 25,000 cranes in recent months.

Sahara says the cranes they folded were strung together and hung on a fence outside a detention facility on the U.S.-Mexico border holding migrant families.

“They want to show the people inside the fence that they have supporters outside and they’re being thought of,” said Sahara.

The grandfather can relate to migrant people behind the fence. Seventy seven years ago, during World War II, Sahara, his family, and other Japanese Americans in his Los Angeles neighborhood were forced out of their homes and bused to the Santa Anita Racetrack, which served as an internment assembly center.

“As I was getting off the bus at Santa Anita, I could see the rows and rows of barracks and I could see the people that were getting off the bus in front of us having their baggage looked through,” said Sahara.

He remembers looking through a fence that kept him from leaving camp when he was 8-years-old.

“Looking out to see the civilian houses, the cars passing by and wondered what am I doing here in Santa Anita,” said Sahara.

He and his family were incarcerated for three years in two different internment camps in Arkansas after Santa Anita. Now, Sahara and other Japanese Americans activists are protesting the confinement of migrant families and President Donald Trump’s plan to move 1,400 migrant children to Fort Sill in Oklahoma, which was used as an Japanese internment camp during World War II.

“The Japanese people say okay we’re not going to let that happen again. This time, if a minority is prosecuted, we’re going to support the minority,” said Sahara.

The former engineer knows it will require more than folding cranes to prevent the government from re-using a former internment site, but he says it is his moral obligation. Sahara plans on protesting outside of a detention center in the Fall.