Tens of millions of immigrants in the U.S. are now, as long promised, in the sights of the administration of Pres. Donald Trump, who is carrying out his threats of mass deportations. The administration is also using various executive orders in attempts to boot certain visa holders from the U.S. and to end Constitutionally protected rights, such as birthright citizenship.

Some of these very rights are the same that throughout history Asian Americans have fought hard for, in a long struggle to prove they are just as American as anyone else.
One key battle was by Wong Kim Ark, in a case from the 1890s that would ensure those born on American soil were granted U.S. citizenship.
“Wong Kim Ark’s case and broader story are hugely important in U.S. history, politics, and law, and deeply meaningful from the point of view of Asian American community histories and contributions as well,” according to Peter Kiang, professor and director of the Asian American Studies Program at UMass-Boston.
Others were by Japanese Americans who opposed their mass incarceration during World War II. Here are some of the key struggles:

Wong Kim Ark: The Citizen
Since the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, the U.S. has granted citizenship to all people born on U.S. soil. This was three years after the end of the Civil War.
The amendment had overturned the verdict of a previous Supreme Court case, Dred Scott v. Sandford from 1857 that had ruled that Black people whose ancestors had been brought to the U.S. as slaves could not be U.S. citizens. Now, however, former slaves would be considered American citizens.
But some did not believe this right extended to Chinese Americans. Shortly after the amendment’s passage came the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, amid a wave of anti-Chinese sentiment in American society. In the 1850s, opportunities such as gold mining, farming, and factory work beckoned more and more Chinese laborers, who settled in the West. Some became successful entrepreneurs. But in a story that would repeat itself throughout generations, the influx of Chinese immigrants soon stirred up resentment and racism. Many felt that the Chinese were stealing jobs and working for lower wages. Chinese faced overt racism with accusations that they were compromising moral standards and diluting white dominance.

The Chinese Exclusion Act enforced a 10-year ban on Chinese laborers coming to the U.S. and was the first significant law limiting immigration in a country considered a nation of immigrants. The act imposed stringent requirements and, in effect, made entering the U.S. an impossible feat for most Chinese. In 1888, this measure was followed by the Scott Act, which banned reentry to the U.S. for permanent residents of Chinese descent after a visit to China.
But in 1895, with the first 10-year ban in full force, Wong Kim Ark contended that the Chinese Exclusion Act did not apply to him. He was, in fact, a U.S. citizen, he said. In deliberating Wong’s case, the Supreme Court drew on 17th century English common law and eventually ruled in his favor, deeming him a U.S. citizen and stating that although the Fourteenth Amendment was originally intended for African Americans, it was not restricted by race.
Birthright citizenship in the U.S., said Kiang, “was affirmed through the persistence of this young Chinese American man in his early 20s.”
The case, however, did not have an effect on the future of the Exclusion Act, that would affect U.S. immigration policy into the 1960s and beyond. When the Act expired in 1892, Congress extended it another ten years in the Geary Act. Finally, in 1902, Congress made the Chinese Exclusion Act “permanent.” Immigration restrictions on Chinese would remain in place until 1943, when China became a member of the Allies during WWII. Immigration based on a quota of national origins—admitting105 Chinese immigrants annually—would not change until the Immigration Act of 1965.

Standing Up to Unjust
Incarceration
Japanese Americans, too, faced discrimination and were penalized simply because of their ethnicity. In 1941, around 120,000 people of Japanese descent were living in the U.S., mostly on the Pacific Coast; around two-thirds were U.S. citizens. In the aftermath of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, however, they came under attack from many in mainstream American society – and the American government itself. In fact, the Office of Naval Intelligence and the FBI had been surveilling select Japanese Americans since the 1930s. Now that Japan had launched a direct attack at the U.S., they quickly moved to arrest over 3,000 suspects of which around half of whom were of Japanese descent.

But the public wanted more. Suspicions circulated that the Japanese Americans had passed information to the Japanese government prior to Pearl Harbor; people worried that if the Japanese were to attack the Pacific Coast, their Japanese American neighbors would join the attack. Columnist Westbrook Pegler declared, “The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.”
Even popular shows like the “Three Stooges” and propaganda posters by the U.S. government would include racist portrayals of Japanese.
Neither Attorney General Francis Biddle nor Secretary of War Henry Stimson believed action against the remaining Japanese American population was necessary, or even legal, but caved to public pressure. In 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which effectively required Japanese Americans to live in “relocation centers”—incarceration camps—for the duration of the war.

The camps offered little protection from the weather and were surrounded by guards and barbed wire. Still, the Japanese Americans adapted, establishing their own little towns within the camps, complete with markets, schools, and newspapers. In 1943, the War Relocation Authority subjected those incarcerated in the camps to a loyalty test, asking them to reject allegiance to the Japanese emperor and to serve in the U.S. military. Around 8,500, mostly second-generation men of Japanese descent, refused, often in protest. They were moved to a separate location.

With the loyalty test administered, there was even less basis for the government to keep the remaining Japanese Americans incarcerated. Officials such as Attorney General Biddle urged Roosevelt to end the program. Four court cases—Hirabayashi vs. United States (1943), Yasui vs. United States (1943), Korematsu vs. United States (1944), and Ex-parte Mitsuye Endo (1944)—challenged the constitutionality of Japanese American incarceration. The last case ruled that “concededly loyal” citizens could not be detained without cause. This simultaneously afforded the U.S. government protection for denying due process and helped to bring about the end of confinement. In December 1944, the Japanese Americans were finally allowed to go free.
“The remarkable, collective, intergenerational efforts by Japanese Americans to eventually win redress and reparations and a public apology from the U.S. government for the incarceration almost 50 years later are also so important to teach and learn, to really understand and internalize,” noted Kiang.
Kiang also stressed a less well-known case in history: that of nine-year old Kinney Lau and his immigrant family and peers from San Francisco. They had argued that the San Francisco Unified School Board denied equal educational opportunity rights for students with limited English proficiency during the early1970s.
“Based on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled unanimously in 1973-74 that educational access to learning must be provided to all limited-English proficient students. Like Wong Kim Ark’s landmark case regarding citizenship rights, Kinney Lau’s historic case established the national basis for K-12 bilingual education in the U.S. which has created such profound, far-reaching opportunities for all populations during the past 50 years, not just Chinese immigrant families.”
But, said Kiang, a new presidential executive order issued on March 1 designating English as the official language of the U.S. “will undoubtedly be used to systematically undermine multilingual access to government services and resources, including bilingual education in U.S. school districts, nearly all of which receive federal funds. Asian American families and communities as well as the general public in the U.S. need to much more clearly recognize the examples of Kinney Lau and Wong Kim Ark and many others as civil rights contributions through courage, advocacy, and long-term organizing that benefited all of U.S. society.”