Vietnamese Refugees Are the Next Target of Trump's War on Immigrants

[Content Note: Nativism.]

The Trump Regime's war on immigrants is a key plank in their vile agenda of wretched malice. The next target in this ever-expanding war are Vietnamese refugees, many of whom have lived in the United States for virtually their entire lives.

Charles Dunst and Krishnadev Calamur at the Atlantic report:

The Trump administration is resuming its efforts to deport certain protected Vietnamese immigrants who have lived in the United States for decades — many of them having fled the country during the Vietnam War.

...In essence, the administration has now decided that Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in the country before the establishment of diplomatic ties between the United States and Vietnam are subject to standard immigration law — meaning they are all eligible for deportation.

...The administration last year began pursuing the deportation of many long-term immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, and other countries who the administration alleges are "violent criminal aliens." But Washington and Hanoi have a unique 2008 agreement that specifically bars the deportation of Vietnamese people who arrived in the United States before July 12, 1995 — the date the two former foes reestablished diplomatic relations following the Vietnam War.

The White House unilaterally reinterpreted the agreement in the spring of 2017 to exempt people convicted of crimes from its protections, allowing the administration to send back a small number of pre-1995 Vietnamese immigrants, a policy it retreated from this past August. Last week, however, James Thrower, a spokesperson for the U.S. embassy in Hanoi, said the American government was again reversing course.

...Many pre-1995 arrivals, all of whom were previously protected under the 2008 agreement by both the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, were refugees from the Vietnam War. Some are the children of those who once allied with American and South Vietnamese forces, an attribute that renders them undesirable to the current regime in Hanoi, which imputes anti-regime beliefs to the children of those who opposed North Vietnam. This anti-Communist constituency includes minorities such as the children of the American-allied Montagnards, who are persecuted in Vietnam for both their ethnicity and Christian religion.

Just to be clear: Many of these are people who fled Vietnam after working with U.S. troops during the war, and would be in danger of persecution if they were forced to return to Vietnam.

I oppose and resist this policy with fervor. And I take up space in solidarity with immigrant families across this nation, including the Vietnamese refugees and immigrants who have become the target of the Trump Regime's vicious nativist malice.