IMMIGRATION & DEPORTATION
Community Defense Against Southeast Asian Deportation
As an organization committed to pan-Asian organizing, we will respond and mobilize in the fight against Southeast Asian deportations. In Fall 2017, AARW began to organize locally and nationally, in response to the rise of deportations in the Southeast Asian community. We are committed to supporting and uplifting the leadership of our Southeast Asian community members, which means we will show up and organize to defend and protect our families and communities.
We recognize that deportations in the Southeast Asian community is a continued cycle of displacement rooted in colonization and US imperialism. Southeast Asian communities - specifically ethnic groups from the countries of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were displaced from their homelands because of war and genocide, and are now facing another form of displacement through the deportation machine. While the number of Asians and Asian Americans targeted by criminal legal systems remains small we know that criminalization is the catalyst for detention and deportation for many Southeast Asian & South Asian community members and that some of our community members are being criminalized because of mental illness and drug use.
We believe that our organizing must be informed and center those who are most impacted, and we will continue to show up and stand with the Southeast Asian community in the fight against deportation. AARW, alongside other Southeast Asian grassroots groups across the country, is organizing to keep our communities safe, and calling for an end to all deportations. In the fight to end Southeast Asian deportations, AARW is part of the Vietnamese Anti-Deportation Network (VADN), the Northeast Region Pardons
Project, and Southeast Asian Deportation Defense Network.
If you or someone you know is vulnerable or impacted by deportation, contact kevin@aarw.org.
RAISE: Supporting UndocuAsians
Revolutionizing Asian American Immigrant Stories on the East Coast (RAISE) is a pan-Asian undocumented group based on the East Coast. Their work is grounded in their personal experiences of being undocumented and Asian Pacific Islander (API). They are part of the 1.5 million undocumented API’s in the United States and they want to use their personal experiences to visibilize and humanize their stories, stories that have been overlooked for far too long.