By Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
The first 100 days since President Donald Trump took office has been filled with heightened anxiety, confusion, and fear amongst many Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI). That’s according to a recent National Council of Asian Pacific Americans (NCAPA) report.
This is particularly true for those who are immigrants and refugees, since most of the executive orders and other federal actions have directly targeted those communities.
Even though the federal government’s efforts to remove immigrant communities isn’t new, Kham S. Moua, national director of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC), told attendees at an NCAPA meeting on May 14, the specific ways the second iteration of the Trump administration is going about it is “unprecedented and is incredibly terrifying.”
These ways include detaining people at legally required check-ins, house arrests, and raids, all of which force people into a corner, and make what should be easy decisions—leaving the house, going to work, going to school, going to the grocery store—difficult and frightening.
“For a lot of Southeast Asian folks, about 15,000, they have final orders of removal, which means that they have to check in with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) very periodically,” Moua said. “They have to reapply for their employment documents yearly. Every single one of these instances are points where immigration and customs enforcement can go after them.”
This chilling effect is far-reaching, Moua said. Immigrants and refugees who had previously been vocal advocates and storytellers have taken a step back, because they are afraid for their safety.
There have also been changes in whom the federal government is detaining and deporting, Moua said. For instance, he said, for the last five years, the Lao government has not usually accepted back individuals from the Hmong community. But that’s changed, he said, and “we’re beginning to see Hmong folks being deported, which is a significant shift in policy and also is a signifier for how this administration is placing pressure on countries in ways that they haven’t felt before.”
“More broadly for Southeast Asian American communities, we do know that they’re rallying together to triage detentions and deportations, but it’s also happening significantly more quietly than it has in the past,” Moua continued. “We’re seeing that, but we’re also seeing that despite everything, our folks are still hopeful.”
These increased detentions and deportations also include people with valid and unexpired green cards, like Lewelyn Dixon from the Seattle area, and a legal resident whom ICE detained, after a visit to the Philippines.
Trump has also successfully won use of the Alien Enemies Act—first levied against Japanese and Japanese American communities during WWII—to deport Venezuelans accused of being gang members. But, Moua said, “We are understanding that the administration is using this to tee up potential ways to justify targeting other folks.”
In anticipation of such targeting, Youngwoon Han said that the National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC), the organization for which he serves as operations manager, has created a Know Your Rights app that people can both read and that can, with a click of a button, read out a person’s rights in English. This can be particularly helpful for people whose first language is not English, if they encounter ICE agents or other law enforcement attempting to carry out a detention or deportation operation.
The app has been translated into 24 different languages, Han said, and the last time he checked, there were more than 28,000 downloads. Han said that he believes that the number of downloads reflect how frightened people are.
He also said that within the first month of the Trump administration, NAKASEC received more calls than it could handle. Most of those were non-emergency calls, he said, and were instead calls asking for clarity about the flurry of immigrant-targeting executive orders.
Since then, NAKASEC has seen a significant drop in calls, which to Han means that “people have been normalizing the situation.”
“But what we are anticipating—and with the ongoing budget fight—is that once the reconciliation bill passes, it will bring a lot more money to the deportation machine, and we will see an uptick of calls that come in for emergency situations,” Han said. “So, we are gearing up for that.”
There’s also the aspect of erasure for AAPI communities to contend with, David Inoue of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) pointed out.
The federal government’s decision to gut the National Parks Service not only imperils public lands, but also jeopardizes national monuments memorializing things like the camps where the United States incarcerated 125,000 Japanese and Japanese American individuals—many of whom were U.S. citizens—during WWII.
“Those sites are vitally important to sharing this history of Japanese American incarceration with a wider audience. And one of our big concerns is with reduced staff, these sites won’t be able to welcome as many visitors to learn about the history of incarceration,” Inoue said.
It is in part for this reason that the JACL and several other groups are suing the federal government.
Such sites are important for the community, Inoue said, because they are places of healing.
“Right now, we’re in the midst of our pilgrimage season when thousands of Japanese Americans, former incarcerees, and their descendants go to these sites to seek healing from the trauma that was experienced,” Inoue said. “But it is really because of that trauma that the Japanese American community is especially concerned with what is happening today. And it’s in so many ways parallel, that experience of World War II. And it really does pain me to say that we really are repeating our past now.”
Inoue also highlighted that the federal government’s destructive actions extend even to federal information webpages and sites, such as those regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, as well as those regarding the LGBTQ+ community.
South Asian Public Health Association (SAPHA) board member Samira Khan said that her organization, which concerns itself with the health and wellbeing of South Asian communities in the U.S., has been “inundated” with alerts regarding what’s going on with Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. The cuts to those programs threaten the health of low-income and immigrant Asians.
“Over 3.5 million Asian Americans … rely on Medicaid for basic care, and many South Asians work in sectors without employer-sponsored insurance or their immigrants-facing language, cost, or status-related barriers,” Khan explained. “And so rolling back a lot of these protections will strip safety nets for those who are already navigating a lot of layered challenges.”
She also said that the cuts to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration further limits already-limited access to mental health care amongst South Asians.
“In South Asian communities, stigma, cultural taboo, and lack of representation among providers already discourage care-seeking,” Khan said. “Cuts to mental health programs are only going to widen that gap, and it’s going to further isolate youth, elders, and recent immigrants who are already struggling.”
Of particular concern, too, she said, is a rise in health disinformation and institutional mistrust, especially when it comes to vaccines, chronic illnesses, mental health, and reproductive health.
“There’s just a lot of misinformation that’s not only being put out by people, but also by the administration. Disinformation, we already know, disproportionately impacts our communities, especially communities with low health literacy or limited access to culturally resonant information,” Khan said. “We see a widespread [amount] of health misinformation going around through WhatsApp groups. With the rise of AI, it’s become increasingly difficult for people to wade through what is right and what is not, especially with the elder population.”
She said that there has also been an uptick in promoting unfounded home therapies for serious medical ailments, and that SAPHA is combating misinformation with educational workshops meant to increase medical literacy. But federal inaction and active disinvestment in federal research and data infrastructure is a significant hurdle in these efforts.
“Without that disaggregated data, entire subgroups within the South Asian diaspora—Bangladeshi, Nepalis, Sri Lankan, Bhutanese—get erased from policy responses, and so we cannot really address these issues if they don’t exist in the data,” Khan explained.
The gutting of federal offices has a similar effect, she said.
“With 10,000 Health and Human Services employees fired, it’s not just bureaucratic, it’s a rippling effect,” she said. “Community organizations especially are impacted. They are being told at short notice that their funding is being stripped and a lot of them rely on federal funding. So not only are we limiting medical research and scientific advancement, but community-based organizations are deeply affected. And if they close their doors, a lot of the community is going to be impacted.”