Join SAPAAC for a special Lunar New Year trip to Angel Island!

We will ride the ferry from the SF Ferry Building to Angel Island, walk through the beautiful scenery up to the Immigration Station, and explore a museum dedicated to a place that serves as both a natural perserve and a memorial of West Coast immigration, especially poignant for the AAPI community.

About Angel Island

Angel Island State Park, the largest natural island in the San Francisco Bay, has a long history: fishing grounds for coastal Miwok, cattle ranches for Mexican rancheros, and a US Army post in the Civil War. But Angel Island is perhaps best known for its role as the "Ellis Island of the West".

From 1910 to 1940, 1 million immigrants from 80 countries (many from China) entered the Immigration Station just off the coast of San Francisco. Those detained faced months or years of harsh questioning and confinement amidst anti-immigrant policies like the Chinese Exclusion Act. During World War II, Japanese and German POWs were held on the island, as were many Japanese-American US citizens who were detained and sent to internment camps across the United States.

In the 1970s, Chinese-American activists formed the Angel Island Immigration Station Historical Advisory Committee (AIISHAC) to preserve an important part of Asian-American history in the United States. The site was made a National History Landmark in 1997, and in 2022, the new Angel Island Immigration Museum opened in the former hospital building, now restored and transformed into a reminder of our not-too-distant past.