Greater than 30 individuals died while being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2025, marking it because the deadliest 12 months for these held in custody by the company in twenty years. No less than 5 of the detainees who died have been Asian nationals: Chaofeng Ge, Nhon Ngoc Nguyen, Tien Xuan Phan, Kaiyin Wong and Huabing Xie. Thus far their deaths have obtained little public consideration, whilst ICE will increase raids, expands capability at its services and accelerates deportations throughout the nation.
As I grieve these deaths, I’ve additionally witnessed ways in which mass deportations have induced palpable concern all through the Asian American group. Just like the Hispanic and Latino communities, in addition to different migrant teams throughout the U.S., Asian households stay beneath fixed risk of illegal detentions, household separations, neglect, abuse and trauma at for-profit prisons.
In August, ICE guards discovered 32-year-old Chaofeng Ge hanging in a bathe stall on the Moshannon Valley Processing Middle in Philipsburg, Pa. Though investigators dominated Ge’s dying a suicide, the autopsy report stated that he was found with his hands and feet tied behind his again. Regardless of these troubling circumstances, the federal authorities has but to launch the complete information concerning Ge’s dying to his household. Chaofeng’s brother filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in November seeking transparency and accountability, and complained that the jail offered no Mandarin interpretation, leaving his brother remoted and presumably with out entry to medical care or psychological healthcare whereas in custody.
A view of the CoreCivic Otay Mesa Detention Middle in San Diego. The personal establishment has been affected by allegations of medical negligence, abusive and retaliatory conduct in opposition to immigrants, sexual harassment, poor meals and water high quality, and different harmful circumstances.
(Carlos Moreno / Anadolu through Getty Pictures)
Seven detainees at the California City Immigration Processing Center have made comparable claims, accusing ICE of inhumane circumstances inside its community of for-profit detention facilities, together with delayed medical care, insufficient meals and water, and restricted entry to interpreters. Issues are prone to solely worsen except the company profiteering that drives mass detention ends now.
Ge’s dying factors not solely to the harmful circumstances inside ICE services, but in addition to the broader local weather of terror that mass deportation insurance policies have instilled in giant segments of our group. At present, 1 in 7 Asian immigrants dwelling within the U.S. are undocumented and beneath imminent risk of removing, and undocumented Asian college students signify a major share of the inhabitants, accounting for about 16.5% of those eligible for DACA advantages.
Given the widespread and devastating affect of ICE arrests, greater than 70% of Asian Americans now disapprove of President Trump’s immigration policies, arguing that his mass deportation practices have gone too far.
Trump’s insurance policies are largely a continuation of immigration legal guidelines which have historically excluded Asian People. Within the nineteenth century, our nation’s first mass deportation laws targeted the surveillance, registration and detention of Chinese people dwelling within the American West. My household’s personal immigration information from a century in the past communicate of my great-grand-uncle’s removing and of my grandparents’ detainment on the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco.
Though my grandfather was a native-born American citizen, his bride was imprisoned by armed guards for weeks as a result of the federal government had racially profiled the 2 as unlawful immigrants. White witnesses have been required to testify on my grandfather’s birthright citizenship, and my grandmother was required to accurately reply a 56-question interrogation or else be deported. The poems of Chinese language prisoners inscribed on the partitions of the Angel Island immigration middle communicate to the concern and injustice that they and hundreds extra endured.
Roy Takeno, standing, addressing group of individuals at City Corridor Assembly, Manzanar Relocation Middle, California, 1943.
(Ansel Adams / Common Pictures Group through Getty Pictures)
Using deportations as a type of worldwide segregation persists as we speak as politicians rehearse previous stereotypes to scapegoat and expel migrants. As soon as once more charged as “criminal” and “invading armies,” a variety of Asian teams face racialized deportation practices that deny them their rights and fracture households.
Contemplate Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Korean American pupil and lawful everlasting U.S. resident. After she exercised her proper to free speech whereas collaborating in student-led demonstrations at Columbia College, ICE moved to revoke Chung’s standing and sought to deport her a number of occasions. Solely when Chung sued the U.S. government to forestall her deportation did she acquire a restraining order, blocking her removing.
One other harmless caught on this system is 6-year-old Yuanxin Zheng, a Chinese language immigrant who arrived in New York Metropolis along with his father in April. At the same time as they have been following correct procedures to realize asylum, the family was forcibly separated by ICE on Nov. 26. Among the many greater than 2,600 kids arrested this 12 months by ICE, Yuanxin is one of the youngest. And though Yuanxin’s panic-stricken father was allowed a quick telephone name along with his son, he was left in the dark about his child’s whereabouts. ICE didn’t reunite the 2 till they were deported collectively, greater than three weeks later.
Immigration activists block a storage utilized by ICE vans throughout a protest in opposition to a purported ICE raid on Canal Avenue on Nov. 29 in New York Metropolis.
(Stephanie Keith / Getty Pictures)
Southeast Asian refugees additionally face a type of double jeopardy beneath the present administration’s insurance policies. More than 15,000 Southeast Asians, lots of whom served jail sentences for offenses dedicated of their youth, confront a second punishment: deportation orders.
For instance, whereas serving 26 years in jail for homicide, Phoeun You graduated from self-help packages, rebuilt his life and proved his dedication to alter as he earned parole. But You by no means acquired to embrace his mother and father upon his launch. As a substitute, he was instantly deported to Cambodia, a nation he by no means knew, and was completely separated from his household. “I went from a life sentence to an everlasting life sentence,” You instructed me once we spoke in February.
Final 12 months, a survey by the Asian American Basis reported that 63% of Asians now feel unsafe because of their race. ICE’s use of racial profiling and our nation’s xenophobic local weather have undoubtedly contributed to those anxieties.
The 5 deaths of Asian nationals in ICE custody in 2025 will not be simply remoted tragedies. They reveal a system that has expanded quicker than oversight can observe. Language boundaries, delayed medical care and an absence of transparency inside detention facilities have already had deadly consequences. This damaged system doesn’t make America safer however as an alternative strikes concern all through complete communities. ICE’s racial profiling and punitive enforcement practices don’t result in safety however as an alternative inflict lasting traumas on households and on generations like mine.
Ge’s passing calls for justice — not just for his household, however for the tip of for-profit prisons, of household separation and of the racist and violent enforcement of deportations. Every is a merciless and weird punishment; collectively they represent a morally bankrupt immigration system.
Russell Jeung is a professor of Asian American research at San Francisco State College and co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate.
