On Sunday, May 25, Immigra-tion Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported 158 Southeast Asian refugees — 93 Vietnamese and 65 Laotian nationals.
This chartered flight is the first mass deportation flight to South-east Asia since 2020 under the first Trump Administration.i Prior to their removal from the U.S., these community members were imprisoned for months in ICE detention centers scattered across the country.
Suddenly, with no notice, ICE transferred them to Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, where many recalled sleeping on concrete floors in cramped holding cells. At the Texas facility, one person reported to his lawyer, “We were treated like animals without human rights.”
On the morning of May 25, they boarded a Boeing 767 and spent 60 hours on a deportation journey that took them from Texas to Hawaii, to Guam to Laos, and then to Hanoi, Vietnam. They were confined to the plane and bound by mechanical shackles the entire flight with minimal water.
Upon landing in Vientiane, Laos, the Lao nationals deplaned and were transferred to a compound. In Ha-noi, the Vietnamese nationals were divided into groups by birthplace or hometown province, and police escorted them to their provinces, some by car and others by internal flights.
For two nationals of Laos and two from Vietnam, the grueling journey included an attempt by ICE to deport them to Libya earlier in the month.
The 158 persons are part of more than 15,000 Southeast Asian refugees living with orders of removal in the U.S.ii The vast majority of the deported community members came to the U.S. as refugee children and youth fleeing war-torn Vietnam and Laos. They were raised as Americans and have no memories of their home country.
Some were born in refugee camps and had never set foot in Vietnam before being deported there. Others are Amerasians, children of Vietnamese women and U.S. servicemen who were stationed in Vietnam during the war.
Despite international refugee laws that promise non-refoulement, which prevents the forcible return of a refugee to a country where they can reasonably fear for their life or freedom, more than 8,600 Vietnamese and 4,800 Laotian refugees are under threat of deportation in the U.S.iii
Southeast Asian immigrants are four times more likely to be deported because of previous criminal convictions than any other immigrant group.iv Yet, their experiences are rendered invisible in conversations on criminal justice, immigration, and race.
Activists argue that deporting Southeast Asian refugees is a form of anti-Asian violence. Deportation has detrimental effects on income, housing, and access to rights and physical well-being, not only on individuals but also on the families and communities they leave behind.v
The deportation of Vietnamese, Laotian, and other Southeast Asian refugees has unique elements. Laos has no agreement with the U.S. that provides for the repatriation of Lao-tian immigrants with deportation orders and has long been labeled by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as “recalcitrant” for refus-ing to accept Laotian American deportees.
The Vietnamese government has historically taken a similar ap-proach. For years, Vietnam refused to repatriate most Vietnamese refugees ordered removed from the U.S. In 2008, after years of negotiation, the U.S. and Vietnam finally established an agreement in 2008 allowing for the deportation of some Vietnamese refugees but specifically excluding any refugees who arrived to the U.S. before July 12, 1995.
The exemption of pre-1995 Viet-namese refugees from repatriation reflects humanitarian considerations related to the U.S.’ role in the Viet-nam War and the subsequent mass resettlement of Vietnamese refugees in America from the 1970s to the early 1990s. But in 2020, before Trump exited his first term, his administration negotiated a new agreement with the Vietnamese government that opened the door for the deportation of “pre-1995” Vietnamese refugees.
Because of the historical inability to remove Vietnamese and Laotian immigrants, ICE has for years released Vietnamese and Laotian individuals with removal orders from custody but required them to check in with an ICE office at least once annually. As a result, many Vietnamese and Laotian immigrants with removal orders have lived in their communities for decades, though with precarious immigration statuses that have not fully protected them from detention or deportation.
The 158 Vietnamese and Laotian immigrants who were recently deported, along with the thousands of other Southeast Asian refugees who are under threat of deportation, have families and children in the U.S. They had jobs, paid taxes, owned small businesses, and were valuable leaders in their communities. They contributed to the fabric of Ameri-can society in many positive ways.
This unprecedented flight demonstrates a historical escalation of deportations of Southeast Asians, marking a turning point for our communities in the U.S. We believe that this is only the beginning of the administration’s plans for mass deportation of our Southeast Asian community members.
i. See DHS Immigration Yearbooks from 1996 to 2023.
ii. This number is roughly calculated by examining differences in court orders of removal from 1998 to 2023 using TRAC data from University of Syracuse and DHS data on removals using non-citizen removals by criminal status and country of nationality from the same years (https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook) for persons from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.
iii. “Suburban Refugees: Class and Resistance in Little Saigon,” University of California Press, 2025.
iv. “Inside the Numbers: How Immigration Shapes Asian American and Pacific Islander Communities,” Asian Americans Advancing Justice, July 2019.
v. Golash-Boza, Tanya, “Punishment Beyond the Deportee: The Collateral Conse-quences of Deportation,” American Behavioral Scientist 63, No. 9 (2019): 1331-1349; Andrews, Abigail, “Banished Men: How Migrants Endure the Violence of Deporta-tion,” University of California Press, 2024.
This statement was created by Vô Danh, a collective of organizers and directly impacted people who advocate for the abolition of ICE and the prison system. They oppose unlawful arrest, detention, and mass deportation of immigrants and refugees, many of whom have been displaced by U.S. policies that contribute to global instability and forced migration. For more information, contact vo.danh.25@ pm.me. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Rafu Shimpo.