Coalition looks to support Southeast Asian Minnesotans facing deportation and detention

NINA MOINI: A new effort has launched to provide support to Southeast Asian communities across the state navigating detainment and deportation. The Southeast Asian Defense Response Project is a collaboration of four different organizations-- Man Forward, Southeast Asian Freedom Network, Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, and Transforming Generations.

They report that 2025 marked, quote, "the highest level of Hmong and Lao deportations in the last 15 years." Minnesota is home to some of the largest concentrations of various Southeast Asian groups, including Hmong, Lao, Korean, Vietnamese, and Cambodian, among others. Joining me now to talk more about this project is Xay Yang, who's the Executive Director of Transforming Generations. Thanks for your time today, Xay.

XAY YANG: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

NINA MOINI: I want to learn from you what you have been learning from community members and people in your family just about the tactics ICE has been using to find and detain people. We heard a story last week about a man named Ricky from Laos who's facing deportation after having lived here for decades. He was apprehended at his home. Can you talk about some of the ways Southeast Asian people are affected and pursued for deportation and detention that folks may not know about?

XAY YANG: We've seen their tactics change ever since they've been here, right, from being outwardly present everywhere to now dressing up in just regular people clothing. And a lot of the tactics that are put out there for defense of immigrants, it's really broad scale. It's designed, I think, not for Southeast Asian folks, because a lot of our people have removal orders, orders to be removed from here, to be detained.

And so the way they're getting picked up, it's not a large sweep, right, at a meat packing place. They're going one by one to people's house, quietly just picking them up. Or, because they have check-ins coming up, they just get detained at their check-in.

And so it's a silent, invisible way of picking us up, different from a lot of the tactics we're seeing where ICE goes, and breaks down somebody's door, and pulls them out. And we see that here and there too. And, unfortunately, a lot of those have been with citizens, right, not, in particular, folks with removal orders.

And so we just, yeah, have been seeing the tactics like that. And as the uprisings happen and ICE becomes more just ingrained in the community, wearing normal clothes, things like that, it's not changed the amount of deportation that's happening in the Southeast Asian community. And, again, it's because the targeting is so different.

NINA MOINI: Can you share a little bit from your perspective about the removal orders, why you feel there are some in the community or in your community more than some others, and what that means-- because people are still in a process. It doesn't mean that they typically would just be removed.

XAY YANG: Yeah. A lot of them at a very young age got involved in some kind of crime, have a criminal history. And as part of, for some of them, a plea deal, they'll sign it to say, yes, let's just do it so that I can get less time. Or some of them don't even know, right-- they just think it's part of an administrative process. And they just have to sign the forms.

And the unfortunate thing for a lot of Southeast Asian folks is that they sign this form to make them removable. And they serve their time, right? And a lot of these Southeast Asian folks come out, and they live their life for 20 years, 30 years. And now, they're getting picked up.

And so they've already established their life, have families, they're married, they have jobs, and they're contributing to society, and now they're getting picked up for that immigration removal order. And it just, for us, feels like it's a second life sentence, or a life sentence, period, right, to send them back to a country that most of them don't even know. And they're here because the US was there first, in the wars in the Southeast Asian communities, or what they call the American War and we might call the Vietnam War, secret war. And so--

NINA MOINI: That's important context, just to mention why the community is here, how it happened. Do you have a sense, Xay, or have you been tracking how many Southeast Asian Minnesotans have been affected by deportation throughout this surge of the past few months, but also throughout the past year or so?

XAY YANG: Yeah. We know that nearly 16,000 Southeast Asian-Americans nationwide are impacted. And I think one of the harder things about this is that, one, they're not being transparent about the numbers of people being detained and being deported. Usually we find out once they're over there or family member calls us and is telling us that they're in detention.

And so I share that number, but it's a really reserved number, right? The latest number, we know, is from July 28, right, 2025 here, is that 970 Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian individuals were deported by ICE. And of those, 17% have lived in the US for more than 30 years.

NINA MOINI: And where are you getting these numbers? I'm sorry.

XAY YANG: These numbers, it's part of a national network of folks that have been also tracking and working on this together.

NINA MOINI: It's just interesting to see, right, that people are having to work together at the ground level to try to come up with data, and to try to track what is going on, and the different trends. And I know that typically, as part of the work that your organization does, you work with survivors of domestic violence or you work in that space. Tell me a little bit about how that space and the space of immigration, deportation intersect.

XAY YANG: We've been working with immigrant refugees because we work with the Southeast Asian community. But the actual work in immigration started with what we call AIM victims-- so abuse of international marriage victims-- who are brought over by US citizens from Southeast Asia. They get here, and they're isolated, right? They get abused, trafficked, that kind of stuff.

And part of the power and control element is the immigration piece, right, not willing to give them their green card, not making them citizens, promising them they would if they do these things, right? And so we ended up working with a lot of AIM victims. And that's how we learned a lot about T Visas, and U Visas, and the implications of immigration, and criminalized victims, and all of that. And then we didn't really jump in until 2019 when they were starting to talk about deporting Hmong people.

And so we're like, oh, we really have to actually think about how this impacts Minnesota, right, being one of the biggest states of Hmong population. And so we started to work through that. And through our work with impacted folks at the time, a lot of them were Hmong men.

But then we saw the ripple effects into the family systems. And then the mental health and the emotional, all of that-- the kids blaming themselves and not really knowing what's happening. So we're like, oh, actually, this is going to be an issue of gender justice, and how do we then prepare ourselves to support these families, because the ones that are truly going to be impacted are going to be the women and children, because the husbands are going to be deported. And they're going to have to start a new life over there. But the person that's going to be helping to fuel that livelihood is going to be the family over here that's going to send money back. And, yeah, so there's a lot of just--

NINA MOINI: Nuance. There's a lot of nuance to the immigration system and to what every family individually is experiencing, which is so hard.

XAY YANG: Yeah.

NINA MOINI: And I wonder if there is a way or ways that, through the model that you all have developed, that you're trying to fill some of the gaps in the holes that you might see people go through.

XAY YANG: What we're learning is that the solution to the Southeast Asian community, in terms of immigration defense, is through the legal route, because they all have mostly removal orders. And what we also realize is the earlier you have representation, the better your chances are.

And even having representation before you get detained, that has a tremendous impact. You get your habeas corpus set up already. You have all the documents you need, access to bank accounts for people that are important in your life. You're just set up to be more successful. And they get to look at your case earlier than at the point where you've been detained, and now they're trying to find you, and have to have license to practice in the state that you've now been moved to.

And so, yeah, it makes sense for us. And on top of that, how do local organizations stay connected to the national organizations that see the large scale trends and patterns so that we can actually inform each other and really make wide scale changes?

NINA MOINI: Xay, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and the work that you're doing. I really appreciate your time.

XAY YANG: Thank you for having us here today.

NINA MOINI: That was Xay Yang with Transforming Generations.