A World War II-era internment site for Japanese Americans on Colorado’s eastern plains is one step closer to becoming a national historic site, after a lone Republican senator holding up the required legislation reached consensus Monday with a Colorado Democrat.

The Amache National Historic Site Act – carried in the Senate by Colorado Democrats Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, and companion legislation in the House by Colorado U.S. Reps. Joe Neguse, a Democrat, and Ken Buck, a Republican – would establish Camp Amache, outside of Granada, as part of the National Park System.

The camp held more than 7,000 Japanese Americans from 1942 to 1945 after they were expelled from their homes near the West Coast under an executive order by President Franklin Roosevelt issued on Feb. 19, 1942. It was one of 10 such camps in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Utah, Arkansas and Colorado.

“I have waited many, many years to see the day where we can be certain that Amache – as a place of reflection, remembrance, honor and healing – is protected for our current and future generations,” said Amache survivor Bob Fuchigami in a joint news release sent by the lawmakers Monday. “My parents did not live to see this day. The time is not only right; it is long overdue.”

Calling Amache “a dark stain on our past,” Hickenlooper said in the news release, adding that elevating the site to a national park will “preserve the survivors’ stories and ensure that history never repeats.”

The bill will “ensure future generations can learn from this dark chapter in our history,” Bennet said in the release, calling Amache “a shameful part of our country’s history.”

Earlier this month Bennet asked the Senate for passage of the act. All members approved, save one – Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah.

Lee received backlash for holding up the creation of the national historic site. An opponent of adding new federal lands without adequate funding, Lee has been one of the Republican Party’s most vocal opponents of the expansive power that federal agencies have to manage public lands in Western states.

“Senator Lee does not object to this specific historical site. He does object to any increase in the total amount of land owned by the federal government as the federal government fails to adequately care for the land already in its vast holdings,” Lee’s spokesman, Lee Lonsberry, told The Associated Press last week.

The Amache site is less than one square mile, Bennett’s office and the Prowers County Assessor said. It contains remnants of barracks, latrines, mess halls, military police structures and a cemetery.

Lee’s stance drew outrage from numerous organizations, including the Japanese American Citizens League and the National Parks Conservation Association, which advocates for the National Park System.

The initiative “not only serves as a healing tool and an acknowledgement of wrongdoing by our government, but it allows individuals and our country to move forward to a better way of being,” said Shirley Ann Higuchi, chair of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation whose parents were interned at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in that state.

She noted that her own father, William Higuchi, went on to become chair of the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Utah; another detainee, Raymond Uno, became Utah’s first ethnic minority judge.

“A lot of Japanese Americans contributed so much to Utah, and it’s a shame that in some quiet way they cannot be honored,” Higuchi said. “They have quietly contributed to our country and it’s unfortunate they can’t be supported by someone from their own state.”

On Monday afternoon Bennet and Lee reached a consensus on the bill on the Senate floor; it passed unanimously shortly thereafter, according to Bennet’s office.

The amended bill now heads to the House for a final vote.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.