Under the Biden administration, Southeast Asian refugees have continued to be deported, and in Boston, community organizations and legislators have collaborated to combat the problem. Over the past few years, Greater Boston Legal Services’ (GBLS) Asian Outreach Unit and the Asian American Resource Workshop (AARW) have served as advocates and fought in individual cases. This past June, 15 senators and 44 other representatives joined the Massachusetts House Asian Caucus to sign a statement condemning “the disproportionate rise in deportations of Southeast Asian refugees.” Through this text, they called for president Joe Biden and Congress to end a policy of racially biased deportations.
“We are working on continuing to support community members in their individual cases, to find relief from deportation,” said Kevin Lam, organizing director of AARW. “When the pandemic happened, because everything shut down for a little, a lot of people’s check-ins that used to happen every six months or every year in person ended up moving to virtual check-ins with ICE. In some ways, that kind of allowed for some space and time for us to continue working with community members on our end to figure out relief and continue building and organizing with them, [while focusing on] the broader issue of deportation. At that time, detentions, to some extent, were not targeted on the Southeast Asian community, at least in Massachusetts.”
State representative Tackey Chan facilitated the conversation behind the creation of the statement put forth by the Massachusetts House Asian Caucus. Chan said that the issue of deportations in Asian communities had been discussed by the Caucus before the pandemic, but once the coronavirus hit, the dialog in Washington D.C. began to change. Chan said that he believes the reason for sending Southeast Asian refugees back to their home countries is because of a racial bias.
“We had conversations about this issue pre-pandemic, but the pandemic changed everything,” said Chan. “The Trump administration tried to change the policy regarding Laos. They wanted to force Laos to take back the Laotians and the Hmong population, as part of the continuation of a [informal] trade agreement. This is unreasonable. … Adding another Southeast Asian refugee population is just not right – using people as political chips in international affairs.” He added, “The real question is on the U.S. side – why does the U.S. government want to do this or have to do this? There’s no real rational reason, other than the fact that it’s racially motivated.”
Bethany Li, director of the Asian Outreach Unit, said that the Biden administration still has a ways to go when it comes to ending the deportation of Southeast Asian refugees.
“The Biden administration has decided to continue a Trump era policy of deporting people to Vietnam, despite an agreement that explicitly had said that people who came prior to 1995 shouldn’t be deported,” said Li. “I think that all administrations need to do a better job of understanding and thinking about what it means to support refugees, including those with criminal records.”
Lam said that he is hopeful about the New Way Forward Act, an immigration reform bill that Congress introduced in January. This legislation could provide a pathway for Southeast Asian deportees to return to the United States. It also aims to decriminalize immigration and address systemic racism in the country’s immigration system. It could also address laws that were passed in 1996, which had established mandatory detentions and deportations, while also expanding the definition of what crimes could lead to a person’s deportation. While Lam thinks that the New Way Forward Act could create relief, he is still disappointed by the Biden administration’s handling of deportations, adding that “what is being offered right now is not enough.”
“A lot of community members we have worked with are hopeful about what the bill and legislation can do, in terms of creating a pathway for return for folks who were deported, creating more prosecutorial discretion versus just a blanket case around how people’s cases are being reviewed within immigration, and creating limitation on deportability,” said Lam. “I think the New Way Forward is promising, but the larger narrative and rhetoric that continues to exist within how immigration is talked about, that really creates this ‘good versus bad immigrant’ narrative, or the ‘deserving and not deserving’… I think a lot of that needs to change, in order for legislation to also move forward in ways that are most meaningful and helpful for our communities, in ways that they don’t get thrown under the bus or are sacrificed when it comes to legislation.”
