Members of Rhode Island’s Southeast Asian community say parallels exist between America’s intervention in Vietnam and President Trump’s current efforts to detain and deport Southeast Asians living in the U.S. Morning host Luis Hernandez spoke with two people who helped organize a rally in Providence on Monday to protest the administration’s policies.
Sarath Suong is a longtime community leader in the Southeast Asian community. Theary Voeul is the deportation defense director for the Providence Youth Student Movement, or PrYSM.
TRANSCRIPT:
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Luis Hernandez: Sarath, I want to get a sense of what feelings, and emotions are going on right now in the Southeast Asian community. So much of the news is about the Latin community, but there’s more and people aren’t talking about it enough. What’s happening?
Sarath Suong: To understand what’s happening, I just want to do a quick thing about who Southeast Asians are, right? When we say Southeast Asian in Rhode Island, we are talking about the refugees who came out of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam from the U.S. militarism in those three countries in the 60s, 70s and 80s. We resettled here in the United States, and in particular in Rhode Island. We’ve called the Ocean State home for almost 50 years now. It’s the 50th anniversary of what we generally call the Vietnam War, but what Southeast Asians called the American War in Southeast Asia. So those are the communities that are here.
We came here in the 80s and 90s. Many of us then got pushed out of the schools into the streets, and for those who were involved in the streets then, or profiled by the police, they got funneled into the immigration system. Those are the ones who have deportation orders. I also wanted to be clear that deportations in South Asian communities have been happening since 2002, so it’s not a new thing for us.
Hernandez: But has anything changed under Trump? Has it gotten worse?
Suong: There’s an escalation now. So what we’ve been hearing from community members is that they’re being asked not just to check in, right? So people with deportation orders are asked to check in periodically with ICE. We are hearing and seeing that now they’re being told, at their next check-in, to be arrested and prepare for deportation.
Hernandez: Theary, there’s a story. A couple of people had taken a trip, came back and were taken by ICE. What, what happened?
Theary Voeul: The two men that are currently detained by ICE are green card holders. Their partners are citizens. They went on this trip not knowing that, coming back from the Virgin Islands, they’ll be stopped by border patrol and detained. Currently, they’re in Florida in the Krome Detention Center waiting for an attorney to represent them. Attorneys shy away from detainees or cases that are currently being held by ICE.
Hernandez: Since that I’m wondering, and Sarath, please jump in, but what’s happening right now in the community? What are people saying to each other? How are you helping each other? Where’s the support?
Suong: People are scared. People are living in fear. People are reaching out to us, to Theary, to other community organizations and asking for help. At the same time, they’re also afraid to go into the streets because as we know, ICE raids are happening in Rhode Island and all around the country with impunity. So our response is manyfold. One is to provide immediate emotional support for the families; two, to provide referrals and legal support that we can in terms of finding lawyers and connecting them with legal resources; third is to launch community response, which is in the form of things like the rally that we had on Monday at the Cambodian Temple on Hanover Street in Providence.
Hernandez: Theary, I wanted to ask you, tell me about PrYSM. Tell me a little bit about what you do.
Voeul: The Providence Youth Student Movement, is a youth-led organization. I’m one of the program directors there who works with Southeast Asians’ impacted members, developing their leadership skills to actually help support other impacted members. Currently, we have over 60 cases, and these are all folks that’ve been sitting with orders of removal since probably 20, 30 years ago.
Hernandez: Right now. What are you telling these folks? What can you tell them?
Voeul: Come in, work on your case, get rid of that deportation order, or prepare for the worst.
Hernandez: Wait, how do you get rid of a deportation order? What do you tell them? What do you do?
Voeul: Yes. So in order for you to get rid of a deportation order, you would have to go back in to vacate your criminal conviction, or there are other avenues within the immigration. If you have severe health issues that if you were to be deported to a third world country, will you survive in that third world country? Will they have the medications or the equipment to save you?
Hernandez: But part of that sounds like, get ready for the worst.
Voeul: Yes.
Suong: That’s kind of the hard reality that we have to have with people at this moment, right? We will do our best and we’ll work with you and your family to fight your case. We also have to prepare our people for the virtuality of deportation, right? So that means get your power of attorney set up, saving some money, learning the language, making the connections in Cambodia, in Laos, in Vietnam, so that when you arrive, you are not alone.
Hernandez: Theary, I’m curious, what are people asking you? What are the typical questions you get from folks?
Voeul: How do I get my loved one out of the detention center? How do I prepare for deportation? What will happen to my spouse and my children when I do get deported? Those are questions and hard questions to answer, right? What are we, as an organization, as a community, doing to prepare for the family that are being left behind? They don’t really care about where they’re going to be in Cambodia or Laos. You know, as long as their family are protected here, they’re good.
Hernandez: There was a protest. Tell me a little bit about it and the purpose behind it.
Suong: Sure. We held a protest at Wat Thorikaram, which is a Cambodian Buddhist temple. Fun fact: It’s the first Cambodian Buddhist temple in the United States. Part of the goal of the rally was one, to bring visibility to the issue and; secondly, to make a statement and to rally the different communities and the neighborhoods to, sort of, visibly see that people are standing up and fighting back against these awful, awful immigration policies.
Hernandez: Sarath, your family fled Cambodia during the Vietnam War and settled in New England. This was just prior to the Cambodian genocide. Does your family’s history influence your activism?
Suong: Absolutely. I was born in a refugee camp and we eventually resettled in New England. Growing up in the 80s and 90s as a queer immigrant, refugee, and Cambodian, I saw firsthand, sort of, what this country thought about refugees and immigrants. I saw my friends beat up, pulled out their cars. I saw us profiled by the police, and pushed out of schools. I took that rage and anger inside me to be able to funnel it into community organizing to change the conditions that we were facing.
Hernandez: Let me finish with this real briefly from both of you. I wanted to ask you if there’s something else you wanted to add about this issue. Theary, I’ll start with you.
Voeul: A lot of our folks with deportation orders have already served their time and they have built a family, their lives here. When they committed those crimes, they were young; they were 17, 18 years old. Now, 20, 30 years later, immigration is punishing them all over again. It’s heartbreaking. We need to put an end to Southeast Asian deportation because we were here because [the] U.S. was there.
Hernandez: Sarath, what about you?
Suong: There’s a deportation defense hotline in Rhode Island for anybody who is picked up by ICE. We will respond. The phone number is 1-401-675-1414.
