How the fall of Saigon fueled a refugee crisis that's still felt today
A woman who fled Vietnam for America in the 1970s says she once hoped that the U.S. would serve as a refuge from the upheaval in her home country. But now, with a family member facing potential deportation under the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration, she said it's beginning to resemble the place she fled.
'You are afraid to go to church. You are afraid to get on the bus,' said the woman, who's based on the West Coast and asked to be anonymous out of fear of retaliation. 'You're on high alert.'
Her family member is among the upward of 8,500 Vietnamese nationals who are facing orders of removal because of past convictions, with many of the offenses dating back decades to their youths.
Southeast Asians are three to five times more likely to be deported on the basis of an old criminal conviction compared with other groups, advocates say, likely due to the community's immigration status as refugees and the difficulties they have had acclimating to life in the U.S. The Trump administration's aggressive detention and deportation tactics, in addition to the growing pressure on Vietnam to accept deportees, have put the refugee group in a particularly precarious position, experts say.
Many of the refugees facing orders of removal fall under what immigration experts refer to as the 'migration to school to prison to deportation pipeline.' Advocates say it points to how those who resettled in the U.S. were given few resources, became entangled in the criminal justice system and were threatened with deportation upon serving their sentences.
As the world commemorates the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War, advocates say that the refugee community's issues have only been magnified.
'Your family was exiled at that point, forced out of the country, separated, starting over. And so you're repeating that cycle,' the refugee said of those who fled Vietnam and now face potential deportation.
Quyen Dinh, executive director of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, or SEARAC, a civil rights group, said that Trump's first term had proved to be a tense time for refugee communities. According to DHS data, 382 Vietnamese individuals were deported during his first administration. That's a 114% increase from Barack Obama's second term. Under Joe Biden, 87 Vietnamese nationals were deported, although official data from his final year in office has not yet been published.
Legal experts and community advocates say that many previous protections for refugees no longer exist. In 2008, the U.S. and Vietnam struck a deal, guaranteeing that refugees who arrived in the United States before July 12, 1995, were not subject to deportation. However, during Trump's first term, more pressure was put on Vietnam to accept deportees and ICE began to detain those who arrived before 1995.
And toward the end of Trump's first term, the U.S. and Vietnam renegotiated the deal, creating a process to deport pre-1995 refugees. Tin Nguyen, a North Carolina-based immigration attorney, said that the increasingly fragile relationship between China and Vietnam, particularly in the South China Sea, likely led Vietnam to cave to repatriation pressures.
'Now, Vietnam needs the United States militarily and strategically to counterbalance China,' Nguyen said.
While the previous Trump administration put visa sanctions on countries like Vietnam that refused to accept repatriations, the new administration has also threatened tariffs, Dinh said. And it's likely to push countries that want to avoid economic consequences to bend. With third countries becoming involved in the American deportation effort, individuals are also fearful of being sent to countries that they are entirely unfamiliar with.
The Vietnam War resulted in what is considered the largest resettlement of refugees in American history, with almost 590,000 refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos coming to the U.S. from 1980 to 1990, according to Pew Research.
These refugee communities still struggle. More than one-fifth of Southeast Asians are considered low-income, higher than the national average, according to a 2020 report from SEARAC. When it comes to educational attainment, nearly 30% of Southeast Asian Americans, more than double the general population, have not completed high school or passed the GED. Immigration issues in particular plague the community.
The challenges, advocates say, can be traced back to the unorganized resettlement effort. Legal and immigration experts say that Vietnamese refugees were scattered across the country and often placed in low-income urban centers that were under-resourced and heavily policed.
For the Vietnamese community, the top counties range from Orange County and Los Angeles in California to Harris County in Texas, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Washington state also became a significant hub for Vietnamese Americans.
Volunteer groups assisted the State Department in these efforts, but lacked a standardized system for helping people transition to their new country, the SEARAC report pointed out. Aside from greeting refugees, matching them with sponsors and sometimes providing a one-time cash assistance, organizations were given little guidance or expectations, the report said. Advocates say that schools provided Asian American students few language resources and counseling or mental health help to cope with the trauma of war.
Nguyen also said the young refugees often endured bullying in their new environment. And parents and elders were still grappling with upheaval themselves, unable to gently guide the stark change, he said.
'Your parents were still traumatized from the war, and couldn't really give that kind of protection or that emotionally secure environment,' Nguyen said. 'A lot of people had to search for belonging outside of the family.'
Advocates say that many refugees turned to gangs or the streets for the protection and acceptance that they lacked elsewhere. And a significant number of them got caught up on the wrong side of the law. While relatively few, compared to other racial groups, are in prison, the number of incarcerated Asian American and Pacific Islanders surged by more than 250% in the decade from 1990 to 2000.
A survey of 447 incarcerated and formerly incarcerated Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders conducted from 2019 to 2021 showed that over half of Southeast Asian respondents said they had experienced bullying, language barriers and lack of counseling in school.
Nguyen, who represents several refugees, said that understanding the criminal justice system was difficult for refugees who often had little access to appropriate legal counsel and resources. A 2000 study of California juveniles showed that Asian juveniles were more than twice as likely to be tried as adults than their white peers.
'A lot of folks didn't speak English very well and didn't have money to hire lawyers … and so whatever the public defender told you to do, you did,' Nguyen said. 'Unfortunately, a lot of folks just took plea bargains for things that they didn't even know, didn't even do.'
Advocates point out that two Clinton-era laws also expanded the types of offenses that subjected legal immigrants to deportation and prevented judicial discretion in immigration hearings. This meant that judges wouldn't be permitted to take an individual's specific circumstances into consideration. Those who served time often were immediately served with orders of removal as well.
'That would end up tearing them and their families apart,' Dinh said.
For many refugees, Dinh said, it's been decades since their convictions and many have turned their lives around, started businesses and have families of their own. Though refugees worried about being detained at their routine check-ins with ICE, the administration's tactics have evolved, she said, with individuals being ripped off the street or arrested in front of their families.
'There were ways that you knew you could still work, and you could still be contributing to society without having to worry that ICE was just going to come get you,' said the refugee whose family member is facing deportation. 'Now it's just mental anguish.'This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
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