More Southeast Asian immigrants living in Los Angeles and Orange Counties are being detained and deported in recent months under President Trump’s administration, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos have been targeted after showing up for their routine check-ins at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices.
Some of their deportation orders had been on indefinite hold for years, some for decades, but are now being enforced under Trump’s crackdown on immigration.
Connie Chung Joe, chief executive of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California, told the LA Times that her organization is aware of at least 17 community members who were detained or deported at their scheduled ICE check-ins.
Who is at risk for deportation?
A majority of the immigrants being targeted are those who have been convicted of a crime considered a removable offense.
This category can include serious crimes like murder, rape, and financial fraud, and are grounds for deportation if the person has been sentenced to at least a year in prison.
It can also include lower-level offenses like theft, forgery, prostitution, domestic violence, drug possession, resisting arrest with violence, unlawful possession of a firearm, and driving under the influence.
Any immigrant, including green card holders, can face deportation for committing multiple lower-level crimes, or if convicted of a crime during their first five years in the U.S.
Why weren’t they deported before?
ICE never followed through with many of these immigrants’ deportation orders after their release from jail or prison because, by that point, they’d lived in the U.S. for so long that their home countries no longer recognized them as citizens.
These immigrants have been allowed to remain in the U.S. so long as they attend regularly scheduled check-ins with ICE agents to prove they are working and following the law.
At least 15,000 Southeast Asians across the U.S. hold this status as of 2024.
Immigration attorney Richard Wilner told the LA Times that many people living in this situation got in trouble as youths, served their time, then went on to “lead remarkable lives, started families, businesses.” But the Trump administration’s new push for mass deportations has made ICE revisit their cases.
Wilson said he’s “gotten more phone calls than [he has] in the past 15 years or longer.”
Within the first month of his second term, the Trump administration deported over 37,000 people. Some of them had lived in the U.S. for decades.
Among these immigrants is Ma Yang, a 37-year-old mother of five and the daughter of Hmong refugees after the Vietnam War.
Yang was born in Thailand and had lived in the Milwaukee area since she was eight months old. She was a legal permanent U.S. resident until she pleaded guilty to taking part in a marijuana trafficking operation in 2020.
In March, Yang was deported to Laos despite having never been there before, not knowing the language, and having no friends or family in the country.
Laos typically refused to accept U.S. deportees in the past.
Will Vietnam accept new deportees?
Yes. In February 2025, the Vietnamese government pledged to support U.S. deportations and quickly handle all new requests.
Vietnam was reluctant to accept U.S. deportees in the past, but changed its stance in response to Trump’s threats of higher tariffs and visa sanctions.
Hanoi will now process deportation requests within 30 days, significantly faster than before.
As of November 2024, there were 8,675 Vietnamese living in the U.S. with a final deportation order. Most of them have lived in the U.S. for decades, following the Vietnam War.
Vietnam signed a repatriation agreement in 2008 to only accept deportees who came to the U.S. on or after 1995.
But in 2020, Trump’s first administration pressured the Vietnamese government to sign a new agreement establishing a process to deport immigrants who came before that date.