Star Trek star George Takei can sympathise with the Honduras youngsters experiencing life in America from border patrol prisons, because he and his family were marched into an internment camp during World War Two.

More than 57,000 people have attempted to gain access to America this year and many of them are children under the age of 12 attempting to escape the gang violence back home.

The majority have been caught at the border by customs officials, and Takei can appreciate what they are going through.

He says, "They come from a terrifying place already. I mean Honduras has the highest homicide rate in the world - kids being killed by gangsters. They are not immigrants, they are asylum seekers for their lives. They can't be treated like immigrants."

And hearing many of them are entering the U.S. behind bars reminds him of his own time in prison camps when he was five.

He recalls, "We were ordered out of our two-bedroom home here in Los Angeles... We were in the living room looking out the front window and I saw two American soldiers with bayoneted rifles come marching up our driveway; they stomped up the front porch and banged on the front door.

"My father answered it and literally at gunpoint they ordered us out."

Japanese Americans were interned in 'War Relocation Camps' throughout the United States in 1942, shortly after Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor.

He adds, "(It's a) dark chapter of American history... (We) were summarily rounded up with no charges, no trial, no due process... and put in barbed wire prison camps, just because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor.

"We were behind those barbed wire fences for the duration of the war. There were 10 camps altogether, all in the most desolate places, hellish places. There were two on the blistering desert of Arizona... and we were sent to the swamps of Arkansas."