Southeast Asian residents are being detained at ICE check-ins in Fresno, advocates and an immigration lawyer say. In some cases, refugees are being deported to countries where they’ve never lived, they say.
It’s not immediately clear how many members from Fresno’s Southeast Asian community have been detained at ICE check-ins and deported since President Donald Trump launched what he says will be the largest deportation campaign in history. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to request for comment on this story.
Many of these individuals are refugees with minor criminal records from years ago that could subject them to deportation, advocates say. But they weren’t deported earlier because, as refugees, the countries they were born in don’t recognize their citizenship. Some were born in refugee camps and are considered stateless. Or, the U.S. didn’t have an agreement in place to deport them to their home countries. In lieu of deportation, they were required to have regular check-ins with ICE.
While these check-ins were a longstanding practice, now, some are of these people are being detained and forced to return to countries they and their families were forced to flee due to political persecution, war and genocide.
Fresno has a large Southeast Asian community, from countries such as Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. It’s also home to the second largest concentrations of Hmong people nationwide, many descendants of U.S. allies during the Vietnam War.
“A lot of them are refugees or children of these veterans (and) have committed a senseless crime when they were teenagers,” said Pao Yang, president and CEO of The Fresno Center. “And then now you’re sending these children of these veterans that fought with the U.S. back to a country that they were fighting against with you.”
During the first Trump administration, the government tried to put pressure on Southeast Asian countries to receive people with deportation orders to those countries. Those efforts have ramped up this year during Trump’s second term, said Tilman Jacobs, an immigrants rights supervising attorney with the Asian Law Caucus, the nation’s oldest Asian American civil rights advocacy group.
“These communities are being impacted in a way that we haven’t seen before,” Jacobs said. Individuals have been deported from ICE check-ins in Fresno, he said, though he didn’t have an estimate on how many had been detained.
Yang, the Fresno Center CEO, said he also knows of “many” Fresno clients that have been detained and transferred to the Golden State Annex ICE detention center in McFarland, where they are held as they await next steps in their immigration cases.
As of late August, Christine Barker, executive director of the refugee-serving nonprofit, Fresno Immigrant and Refugee Ministries, knew of at least five individuals of Laotian or Cambodian descent being detained at their ICE check-ins in Fresno.
“I also know from some of their family members, when they got to [the Golden State Annex ICE detention center in] McFarland, they were like, ‘there’s a lot of Asian people here,” she said.
While California’s Southeast Asian communities have experienced more sporadic immigration enforcement, other states such as Michigan and Minnesota have seen more high-profile enforcement activity. More than 150 Southeast Asians have been deported from Minnesota since May, according to an Aug. 18 report in the Minnesota Reformer.
Jacobs said the practice of detaining people at ICE check-ins was more common during the first five or six months of the administration, but he hasn’t seen as much of it recently in California.
“That doesn’t mean it’s not going to continue happening,” he said. “It’s definitely a real risk. But I also don’t want to overstate it.”
Hmong people are an ethnic group originating from China and that have their own language and culture. Because of decades of persecution by the Chinese government over their cultural and spiritual practices, the Hmong have constantly migrated to Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar. In the early 1960s, the CIA recruited Hmong people to help fight against North Vietnam and the communist party in Laos, known as the Pathet Lao. The operation, also known as The Secret War, lasted from 1962 to 1975. When the Pathet Lao took over Laos’s governance, thousands of Hmong and Laotian people sought refuge in the United States in 1975.
Barker said what’s happening to these refugees is a violation of human rights.
“When you’re a refugee, the world is supposed to protect you from ever having to return to the country you fled,” she said. “These are uncles, these are grandpas, these are old, old convictions from the 80s and the 90s.”
Deported to Laos, Cambodia
Families, lawyers and nonprofits are scrambling to support individuals that have been deported to countries such as Laos and Cambodia.
Thao Ha, runs Collective Freedom, an organization that supports “justice-impacted” individuals from Southeast Asian communities. In recent months, her organization has had to pivot to provide support on the ground in Laos and is helping families track down their deported loved ones.
“We didn’t think they were going to go this hard, this fast, or at all,” she said. The community had assumptions that people couldn’t get deported to Laos, or that only a few here and there would be deported, Ha said.
Laos doesn’t have a formal repatriation agreement with the U.S., according to the Asian Law Caucus. But the Trump administration has pressured Laos to accept deportees — including people who were not born in the country and whose parents fled the country — by threatening to withhold business and tourist visas to Lao citizens.
When people are deported to Laos, they are detained upon entry in Laos for multiple weeks, advocates say. Those with a local sponsor are released more quickly. Those who don’t have a sponsor will be detained longer until the government can process them.
Ha said there’s no official repatriation process in Laos, meaning there’s little infrastructure to help people with housing, work, or cultural adjustment.
“There’s not an agency, so to speak,” Ha said. “We’re just trying to rapid response and mutual aid at this point.” Several groups have “popped up” to try to fill the gaps, but none are formal non-governmental organizations.
The “number one challenge” for people with their loved ones being deported to Laos is that they don’t have family there, Ha said. “If they don’t have family and don’t have a sponsor, where do they go? What do they do? Are they just roaming the streets?”
For some deported to Laos, especially those born in refugee camps, they have no relationship to the country, language skills or community knowledge. “For Hmong folks who grew up in the U.S., they may never learn Lao,” Barker said.
Barker also said there used to be programs to help people from the Khmer Indigenous ethnic group acculturate in Cambodia.
“Those programs disappeared when USAID was gutted,” she said.
Fleeing war, genocide, persecution
Jacobs of the Asian Law Caucus said his organization works with Southeast Asian refugees who are facing pending deportation, oftentimes from very old convictions.
“Many of the people that we work with have consistently followed all of those terms with their release and continue to do so,” Jacobs said. “And I know that there is a lot of anxiety right now around these check-ins.”
Many of the organization’s clients were fleeing civil war, genocide and persecution and carry memories of trauma associated with the unfamiliar country, he said.
“In many cases, there are countries that don’t really want to receive people who left so long ago, and what a lot of them are facing in real terms, is statelessness where they’re not recognized as citizens of those countries,” he said.
For example, he said, Hmong people in Laos are given some kind of residency status, but they are not citizens. And this sense of not belonging can have lingering legal, emotional and psychological impact.
Yang said many in the Southeast Asian immigrant community are quiet and scared because many come from a country where the government targets people. Earlier this year, there was a rush of people seeking legal services, but now, especially after the start of the June immigration crackdown in Los Angeles, he’s noticed a “huge drop” in people seeking assistance.
“We have a lot of folks, even legal resident aliens, that are in hiding, that are afraid,” he said.
