war veterans for their brave wartime service. Even today, immigrants who have served in the United States military are denied recognition, face deportation for decades-old convictions, and have to worry about family members being deported. They deserve better.
Lundy Khoy
One and a half million refugees from Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos came to the United States as refugees during the 1980s. Their children were very young and grew up as Americans. As refugees in the United States, they faced many obstacles, including language barriers, being resettled in neighborhoods with high crime and unemployment rates, and mental health needs stemming from war-related trauma.
Adjustment was particularly difficult for Cambodian refugees who fled a genocide that killed one third of the population. Ninety-nine percent of Cambodian refugees had faced starvation, ninety percent had lost a close relative in the genocide, and seventy percent continued to suffer from depression.71 Faced with these difficulties, many of the younger refugees who grew up in the United States turned to gangs as surrogate families, and to drugs for escapism.
Lundy Khoy was born in a Thai refugee camp to Cambodian parents who fled the war that had torn their country apart. When Khoy was just one year old, her family was resettled in the United States. When she was nineteen, Khoy fell in with a bad crowd. After a night of partying, a police officer asked her if she had any drugs. She truthfully said she had several tabs of ecstasy, resulting in her arrest for possession with intent to distribute.72 Khoy pled guilty and was given a five-year sentence in criminal court. She was detained by ICE officers, and informed that she would be deported to Cambodia.
Since Cambodia did not issue the travel documents necessary for deportation, Khoy was eventually released from detention. She returned home, finished school, went back to work, actively volunteered in multiple charities in her community, and eventually got married and had a son with her US citizen husband. After working with a filmmaker to document her story in the short film, Save Lundy, she began to advocate in Congress for fair and humane deportation laws. In 2016, Khoy was granted a Governor’s pardon.
Unfortunately, Southeast Asians such as Khoy are three to four times more likely to be deported for old criminal convictions than people from other migrant communities.73 Since 1998, over fifteen thousand individuals have received final orders of deportation to Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.74 Through her advocacy, Khoy changed what could have been a disaster, but thousands more have not been given a second chance. They are sent back to countries where they have never set foot before, since many were born in refugee camps outside their parents’ countries of origin.
Over time, naturalization became the government’s second line of defense against immigrants they considered undesirable. Nowadays, immigrants are thoroughly vetted before they can gain lawful permanent residence. And they are vetted again when they apply for US citizenship. In this manner, all immigrants are vetted at least twice before they can become citizens.
The current deportation regime has its roots in efforts to exclude African Americans and Asian Americans. But ironically, these groups remain at the periphery of the debate over immigration policies and reforms. Though today, deportations do not just target black and Asian immigrants, the deportation regime continues to be racialized, even as the government increasingly uses the criminal justice system to funnel people into the prison-deportation pipeline.75. Black immigrants still are disproportionately targeted for deportations, as are Southeast Asian refugees like Khoy.76
Nothing compares to the Fugitive Slave Acts that treated black persons as equivalent to property. But the laws that allowed local authorities to pursue free black persons and fugitives from slavery now emulated by state law enforcement to arrest, detain, and deport immigrants. Engineered by modern-day white nationalists, states such as Arizona, Georgia, Florida, and Alabama have passed brutal laws against undocumented immigrants for the purpose of “attrition through enforcement.” These laws do not just harm immigrants. Because of the racialized regime of enforcement, they also target United States citizens, many of whom have been arrested, detained, and deported.
In order to cut through the current impasse on immigration, immigrant rights, and criminal justice, the political struggles of brown and black people and others need to recognize our shared experiences and common goals, so that we can together build a racial justice movement. Without actively working and building alliances in black communities, non-black immigrant rights advocates risk isolating ourselves from those with whom we have the most in common.
Under the Trump administration, the United States expand to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has detained or deported several prominent immigrant activists across the country.
In Jackson, Mississippi, ICE arrested and detained Daniela Vargas, an undocumented immigrant, after she spoke out about immigration issues at a conference.77 In Vermont, around the same time, ICE detained José Enrique Balcazar Sánchez, Zully Victoria Palacios Rodríguez, Yesenia Hernández-Ramos, and Esau Peche-Ventura—four organizers with Migrant Justice, a workers’ rights organization.78 In Tucson, Arizona, a federal judge ordered the deportation of Alejandra Pablos, a well-known immigration and reproductive rights activist, after denying her case for asylum.79 In Seattle, Washington, Maru Mora-Villalpando, an activist who heads the Northwest Detention Center Resistance (NWDCR), received a Notice to Appear in removal proceedings because of her continued resistance to the deportation regime.80 These cases are not unique. Indeed, federal lawsuits document over twenty cases of undocumented immigrant activists arrested nationwide in the last couple years.81
News of these arrests and detentions of migrant activists sent shockwaves through immigrant communities, even though ICE publicly denied targeting them for their political activities.82 Noncitizens with some level of protection, such as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), no longer felt safe, let alone those who have no protection from deportation. But in almost every instance, people visited their loved ones, shared the news on social media, scrambled for legal assistance, and made calls to authorities requesting them to free the advocate facing deportation. Advocates urged people not to let their immigration status lapse, and to not speak out publicly about their immigration statuses. However, putting the onus on those who have taken great risks to advance their cause hardly seems like an adequate answer to the Trump administration’s continued assault on immigrant rights.
Deportation as a form of silencing political dissent is hardly a new tactic of the nation state. Donald Trump is making headlines for his proposals to impose ideological tests on immigrants, but the fear of foreigners and their political ideologies has defined US immigration laws for generations.
The United States has long used the threat of deportation as a tool of political control. The horrific assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 at the hands of a self-proclaimed anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, set the stage for congressional action to curb immigration based on ideology alone.83 Even though Leon Czolgosz was born in the United States, people presumed he was an immigrant because of his surname, triggering a legislative overreaction with the goal of stopping foreign-born anarchists from coming to the United States. Congress responded with the Alien Immigration Act of 1903 (“Alien Act”) permitting the exclusion of “…anarchists, or persons who believe in or advocate the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States or of all government or of all forms of law, or the assassination of public officials.”84 But the law was not about national security or taking action against those who threatened public safety. Rather, the new law reflected broader concerns about social and progressive movements that threatened the status quo of United States politics.
For years to come, under the guise of national security and public safety, the US government would use deportation as a way to target political activists, from John Turner, Emma Goldman, and Marcus Garvey, to Tam Tran and other contemporary immigrant rights leaders.
