SACRAMENTO — The Tule Lake Committee (www.tulelake.org) has issued the following statement.

On Tuesday, May 21, at 9:30 a.m., Japanese American legal history will be made. We ask survivors and descendants of Tule Lake to join us in bearing witness.

The Tule Lake Committee’s pro bono legal team will be making oral arguments in Tule Lake Committee v. Follis, et. al, to challenge the transfer of the Tulelake airfield from the City of Tulelake to the sovereign Oklahoma Modoc Nation.

The matter of ownership of the historic Tule Lake Japanese American concentration camp lands will be heard before California’s Third District California Court of Appeal in Sacramento at the Stanley Mosk Library and Courts Building, 915 Capital Mall.

The disputed 359-acre Tulelake airfield property occupies two-thirds of the Tule Lake concentration camp’s barracks area, where over 27,000 Japanese Americans lived while unjustly incarcerated from 1942 through 1946.

TLC v. Follis is the Tule Lake Committee’s remaining lawsuit in six-years of litigation challenging the City of Tulelake’s giveaway of the Tulelake airfield to a sovereign nation that promised to expand aviation on the former concentration camp site.

Courtroom seating is open to the public between 8:30 to 9:30 a.m.

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