At the start of World War II, as the US Government prepared to forcibly remove and incarcerate all Japanese Americans living on the West Coast, a small number of Japanese Americans took their fate in their own hands and fled the coast, becoming refugees in their own country, on a forced migration into the unknown. Before They Take Us Away is the first documentary to chronicle the untold stories of the "self-evacuees" who spent the war years outside the camps, as they struggled to rebuild their lives and overcome poverty, isolation, hostility and violence.

Chronicle the previously untold stories of Japanese Americans who self-evacuated from the West Coast in the wake of forced incarceration during World War II.