Creating Communities of Care Amidst Deportation
By Jennifer Huynh, author of Suburban Refugees: Class and Resistance in Little Saigon
Fifty years after resettlement following the US War in Vietnam, nearly 17,000 Southeast Asian refugees are living with deportation orders. Most Southeast Asians with orders of removal came to the US as refugee children or youth or were born in refugee camps, were raised as Americans, and have no memories of living in Southeast Asia. Many have spent years with orders of removal, with no country to be deported to until recently.
The urgency of this issue is highlighted by the unprecedented numbers and rates of deportation over the past twenty years and the current administration that promises to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” There are nearly 8,600 people from Vietnam waiting to be deported. This affects not only those removed but their families and communities they leave behind.
In my book Suburban Refugees, I interview Vietnamese people living with orders of removal. I examine Vietnamese antideportation campaigns and draw on individual oral histories in Little Saigon that highlight the experiences of living in limbo and the community responses to this violence. Suburban Refugees is part of a burgeoning field of work written by refugees and the children of refugees that humanizes stories while also critically analyzing structures of inequality and disadvantage. Despite international refugee laws that promise non-refoulement—which is intended to prevent the forcible return of a refugee to a country where they can reasonably fear for their life or freedom—thousands of Southeast Asian refugees await deportation.
The experience of removal and deportation for Southeast Asian refugees is somewhat unique. Because of the legacy of the war and US intervention in Southeast Asia, the US only established repatriation agreements with Vietnam in 2008 and then again in 2016 when the US Department of Homeland Security pressured the Vietnamese government to accept pre-1995 refugees for deportation. In the case of Cambodia, a memorandum of understanding was signed in 2002 to repatriate individuals. In Laos, a repatriation agreement has yet to be signed, yet people are still being removed.[i] US immigration policies during the 1990s expanded an emerging prison-to-deportation pipeline, which widened the category of crimes that could lead to deportation, and these changes were also applied retroactively.[ii] Many Southeast Asians with deportation orders are not immediately removed from the country, and it can be years or decades before they are deported.
While the US commemorates the 50th anniversary of the end of the US War in Vietnam, for some in the diaspora, the war has not ended. The legacies of war continue to shape the community and threaten to tear apart families.
In response, Vietnamese communities are organizing to create mutual aid and community care. The Ba Lô (Backpack) Project aims to provide returnees the support they need to rebuild their lives in Vietnam by creating an infrastructure of welcome and support. It begins with a simple act of community care. Each returning person is gifted a starter backpack filled with items like medicine, socks, shoes, a toothbrush, a map, and a phone—essential things other returnees wished they had after first arriving in Vietnam. This grassroots mutual aid project is carried out by people in the diaspora who do not believe in the U.S. deportation machine and believe that families should be together. They are attorneys, impacted people, community organizers, professors, nail industry professionals, workers, etc.
While the US commemorates the 50th anniversary of the end of the US War in Vietnam, for some in the diaspora, the war has not ended. The legacies of war continue to shape the community and threaten to tear apart families. Short-term individual acts of mutual aid and long-term systemic transformation are needed by supporting policies co-written by impacted community members, such as the Southeast Asian Relief and Responsibility Act, the New Way Forward Act, and the Southeast Asian Deportation Relief Act. Mass deportation affects all of us. More than 1 in 20 people in the US live in a mixed-status family.[iii] Now more than ever, we need to turn to one another within and across our communities for care.
[i] “Resources for Southeast Asian Refugees Facing Deportation,” Asian Law Caucus, November 10, 2022.
[ii] Massey, Douglas S. “Creating the Exclusionist Society: From the War on Poverty to the War on Immigrants.” In The End of Compassion, pp. 18-37. Routledge, 2020.
[iii] Vimo, Jackie, “Immigrants at the Border of Equity and Opportunity: Eliminating Barriers for Low-Income Immigrants in the United States,” National Immigrant Law Center, April 2, 2024.
About the Author
is a sociologist and Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is second-generation Vietnamese from Southern California.