One day this year, Indroneal Banerjee tucked his passport into his pocket before leaving his house. He hasn’t stopped carrying it since.
It’s protection from what he describes as “a cloud of disappearances.”
There were more San Diego area Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests of people with citizenship in Asian and Pacific Islander countries in a single month this summer than all of last year combined, according to agency records.
Banerjee is the president of the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Democratic Club of San Diego.
He said for the first time, people who’ve been in the U.S. for 40 or 50 years, even those with a legal status, are afraid to leave their homes. Friends and family members text him when they’re going to church, school or the grocery store — just in case they never come back.
Still, enough club members and allies ventured out Wednesday night to fill a labor union meeting hall in Kearny Mesa. Many more joined via Zoom from the safety of their homes.
A projector flashed a dozen recent headlines across a large screen:
“Korean PhD student detained in California despite green card.”
“Person arrested by immigration agents near Chula Vista Elementary school.”
“Asian Americans Left Out of Immigration Debates, But Not Crackdowns.”
In front of the screen, AAPI leaders shared their experiences with what they said felt like a tidal wave of immigration enforcement.
Thao Ha is a professor of sociology at MiraCosta College. She runs Collective Freedom, a grassroots organization that supports justice-impacted individuals from Southeast Asian communities.
She said she works with people who were “caught in the school to prison to deportation pipeline” as young people. They had removal orders but were never deported because their countries would not take them back. Decades later, policy changes have suddenly rendered them deportable.
“So you’re talking about the disruption of people’s lives who’ve been here 20, 30, 40, even 50 years. I’ve been working with people who are in their 70s who are now being deported,” she said. “They have children. They have grandchildren. They’ve made their lives here.”
About half of the AAPI people arrested in the San Diego area this year have no criminal record. Almost half of those arrested are from Vietnam.
Ha said detention center stays can be grueling and military deportation flights long.
“If you were a Vietnamese, you were on a 50-hour flight, shackled hands and feet,” she said.
The process is unavoidable for many who would rather self-deport. She said self-deportation is often inaccessible for refugees, including people whose birth certificates were destroyed or lost in the Vietnam War.
Then there’s the question of children who were born in refugee camps.
“Are they really citizens of these countries that their parents were from? So it’s a bureaucratic mess,” Ha said.
Speakers shared stories to a silent room — a man detained on the way to his father’s funeral; a caregiver who needs a deportation delay so he can get his mother with Alzheimer’s into a facility; a professor with citizenship who cancelled classes for two weeks, scared by a call from someone identifying as ICE; international students reluctant to organize for fear their visas will be revoked.
“It’s making 20-year-olds, teenagers, afraid to get involved because they don't know if they're going to be punished by the full weight of the federal government,” said John Paculdo Koenigshofer, vice president of the club and a recent UC San Diego graduate.
In many ways, these experiences are universal among immigrant communities of color right now.
But Koenigshofer said AAPI people are underrepresented in conversations about immigration enforcement.
“There's this culture among Asian-Americans that we should just go along to get along,” he said. “We don't really speak up when we're being treated the wrong way.”
He said there are many reasons for that.
One is “the model minority myth, in where Asian-Americans are kind of placed in their own separate category, away from other communities of color. But in the way that we're being treated, we're being treated like every single other community of color out there. So that model minority myth is just that. It's a myth. And that's something that we need to push back on. And it starts by speaking out and standing up for ourselves,” he said.
Those who spoke Wednesday night are hoping their stories encourage bolder action from local leadership.
ICE did not immediately respond to KPBS’ questions.
