*Asian American organizations are expressing concern and urgency in response to President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign pledge to carry out mass deportations.
Sources close to the Trump campaign have indicated that undocumented Chinese immigrants of military age may be prioritized for deportation under the new administration, citing potential national security concerns, NBC News reports.
“We know that both the state and federal government have deemed China as a national security threat,” said Bethany Li, executive director of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. “We saw this in World War II with Japanese Americans incarcerated. We saw this post-9/11 with Muslim and South Asian men being detained and some deported.”
Li highlighted state laws that limit property purchases by Chinese individuals and referenced the Trump-era China Initiative, a security program criticized for racially profiling Asian scholars.
Trump has frequently claimed that “military-age” Chinese men may be planning to form an army against the U.S.
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“They’re coming in from China — 31, 32,000 over the last few months — and they’re all military age and they mostly are men,” Trump said in April during a campaign rally. “And it sounds like to me, are they trying to build a little army in our country? Is that what they’re trying to do?”
According to NBC News, sources connected to his campaign revealed that targeting Chinese nationals aligns with broader plans by the transition team to terminate two Biden-era immigration programs and deport individuals who entered the U.S. without yet obtaining asylum.
Jo-Ann Yoo, executive director of the nonprofit Asian American Federation, said her New York-based organization has been holding meetings and conducting scenario planning to prepare for Trump’s immigration proposals. The group plans to connect with multilingual attorneys who can assist families with mixed immigration statuses.
“We’ve got to get people out there so that people understand what their rights are,” Yoo said. “We’ve got to make our nonprofit organizations visible so that people who don’t normally go to these resources say, ‘Oh, something’s happening in my family. I’ve got to go ask for help.’ It’s a whole lot of education that has to happen, and it has to happen in-language.”
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