Orders have come down from the Trump administration, almost certainly from Stephen Miller. Whether explicitly or not, they are tantamount to “get rid of the brown people.” That includes relatively obscure communities, like Asian Pacific Islander and Desi Americans (APIDA), whose targeting by ICE has radically accelerated under Trump. Between January 20, 2025, and March 10, 2026, there have been 14,678 arrests, 13,455 detentions, and 6,453 deportations of APIDA immigrants. This represents a sixfold increase in arrests and detentions and a ninefold increase in deportations compared to the Biden administration—some of the largest increases yet.
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For comparison, Latino communities have seen a fivefold increase in arrests, a threefold increase in detentions, and a twofold increase in deportations. Because of their numbers, Latino communities are still the target of the overwhelming majority of ICE operations, but smaller communities are not escaping notice. This is according to government data provided by ICE in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, processed by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by the Prospect. The most recent release of data from ICE only describes enforcement actions through early March 2026.
These statistics do not reflect the humiliation ritual that many APIDA victims of ICE endure. In February, a federal judge ordered the release of Greggy Sorio—a Filipino immigrant—from detention in Tacoma, Washington, after ICE’s failure to provide medical care resulted in two partial foot amputation surgeries, ulcerative colitis, blood loss, and a kidney injury, alongside other medical conditions. In January, ICE agents in St. Paul, Minnesota, bashed in the front door of ChongLy “Scott” Thao—a Hmong immigrant. Without a warrant, ICE agents held Thao at gunpoint and dragged him into the snow of his front yard while he was wearing only sandals, shorts, and his grandson’s blanket as a makeshift shirt.
TERROR STALKS THE APIDA COMMUNITY. The Prospect talked to Quyen Dinh, the executive director of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC), a national civil rights organization for Southeast Asian communities across the U.S. “We have seen that there are families who are sheltering in place, who are afraid to leave their home because they’re not sure if this run to the grocery store is going to be the last time they see their families,” Dinh says.
APIDA individuals “experience racial profiling, so whether you had a deportation order or not, you are seen as a suspect from the perspective of ICE.” She adds that “we’ve seen the escalation of violence being used as tactics all across the country, including breaking into people’s homes and arresting them without warrants.”
According to a 2026 brief from the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, ICE arrests of APIDA individuals in community settings—such as public areas, homes, and worksites—have jumped nearly 1,200 percent under the Trump administration compared to the Biden administration.
Racial profiling and unwarranted attacks are not a new phenomenon experienced by APIDA communities. One of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history occurred in 1871 when over 500 people murdered 17 Chinese Americans in Los Angeles’ Chinatown while looting local Chinese American homes and businesses. Just 11 years later, the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act started a series of legislative efforts that subjected Chinese individuals to state-sponsored violence and deportation.
APIDA detention and deportation is unique because members of the community consistently face longer lengths of detention and language barriers.
History has laid the groundwork for the distressing rise in ICE actions against Southeast Asians and the broader APIDA community: The largest population of refugees resettled in the U.S. are from Southeast Asian countries. In 1975, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) started accepting more than a million refugees from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the Cambodian genocide, and regional instability caused by decades of U.S. military involvement.
Many of these refugees have already been targeted. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which mandated detention for any undocumented individual with a prior criminal conviction and retroactively expanded the types of convictions that can trigger removal orders. IIRIRA made it possible for noncitizens to be deported for nonviolent misdemeanors, even though they were not aware that their conviction would be grounds for deportation and/or had already completed their sentence.
“This was 15 years into the refugee experience when communities were still so newly starting to integrate within their communities,” according to Dinh. “There have been over 15,000 Southeast Asian Americans with final orders of removal to countries that they fled as refugees, the majority of them, for past crimes of youth, of poverty, that were served decades ago.” For Dinh and SEARAC, the deportation of a formerly incarcerated individual constitutes a violation of due process and the protection against double jeopardy.
“It is inhumane, particularly when these are individuals who, if you see and hear them, they walk like Americans, they talk like Americans. Now, they are being sent to countries that they fled as survivors of war and genocide,” she adds.
APIDA DETENTION AND DEPORTATION is unique because members of the community consistently face longer lengths of detention and language barriers.
On average, APIDA detainees are consistently held in detention around six to eight weeks longer than their non-APIDA counterparts. Elizabeth OuYang, a civil rights attorney who has worked on removal cases for nearly four decades, explains, “It takes longer to deport people who are from countries farther away, because the government waits until there is a sizable number from those home countries before they deport them.”
Longer periods of detention can also be attributed to a country’s refusal to accept deportees from the U.S. For example, a humanitarian crisis in the Himalayas emerged when Bhutan expelled and revoked citizenship from over 100,000 ethnically Nepalese individuals starting in the late 1980s. USRAP resettled approximately 85,000 Bhutanese refugees in 2006. Naturally, ICE has sought to remove some of these refugees; but because Bhutan has refused to accept most refugees with final orders of removal, ICE has been forced to hold these refugees in detention for longer periods of time and/or release them on orders of supervision. The governments of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos have also refused to accept those final orders of removal.
Historically, ICE has often opted for an order of supervision when a country refuses to accept the deportee or when other considerations—like humanitarian and medical needs—justify release. Instead of being sent back to their country of origin, the deportee is released back into the U.S. under the condition that they regularly check in with ICE, usually every few months. Orders of supervision have been a beacon of hope for those with final orders of removal; but the Trump administration has dramatically reduced its usage of orders of supervision, instead opting to hold detainees in mandatory detention or simply dumping them in third countries.
The Trump administration’s dependency on detention and third-country deportation of APIDA detainees has raised transparency concerns among many. “There have been issues of APIDA detainees who have died in these detention centers, and it’s unclear as to what the circumstances of those incidents are,” OuYang told the Prospect. There are at least 60 known deaths from ICE custody, as of August 12, 2026.
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT FAILS to provide many APIDA detainees with information in a language they can understand. With more than 100 languages and dialects spoken in the U.S., interpreters can be hard to find, and 41 percent of immigrants from Asia over four years of age have limited English proficiency (LEP), according to a 2023 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Los Angeles Times.
ICE and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which administers immigration proceedings, are legally required to identify a migrant’s primary language and provide services in that language. “Language translation is necessary to have equal access to [removal] proceedings and to be able to meaningfully challenge any procedural or substantive violations,” OuYang told the Prospect.
Translation can make or break a respondent’s attempt to ward off the government’s request for removal. Without it, an immigrant has very little chance of succeeding. But even with it, immigration proceedings are a daunting challenge since respondents must interact with immigration officials and judges through one or even two interpreters.
And that’s in the best-case scenario, because interpreters for less commonly spoken languages are scarce, and those that can provide adequate translation of complex legal terminology in the respondent’s primary language are scarcer. Even if an interpreter is provided, there is a risk of miscommunication. Many APIDA languages and dialects simply do not have perfect translations for the highly complex legal terminologies used in the U.S.
Worse still, interpreters are not obligated to translate the entirety of a removal hearing. EOIR policies allow for partial interpretation where interpreters must translate exchanges between the respondent and others, but are not required to translate exchanges between attorneys and witnesses, even if the respondent cannot understand them. Lastly, many immigration court forms must be submitted in English and are not available in some languages spoken by APIDA respondents—like Ilokano, a regional dialect in the Philippines. This increases the demand for an already limited supply of interpreters.
Finally, sometimes ICE and the EOIR just don’t provide a proper interpreter at all. “I’ve had situations where even when [the court] did provide a translator, the court provided the wrong translator, and the translator themselves said that they could not understand what the respondent was saying,” says OuYang.
These issues reflect a deliberate strategy to increase the likelihood of obtaining a final order of removal by exploiting a detainee’s LEP and lack of understanding of their legal rights to expedite deportations. “One very common practice in this administration is to move detainees farther away, particularly to the South, where access to language interpreters is sparse at best or nonexistent,” OuYang explains.
“It makes access by the family very difficult, as well as access for the family to get immigration attorneys to help,” she adds. This strategy expedites deportations of detainees because without access to their families, interpreters, and immigration attorneys, detainees are left alone to fight procedural errors or legal rights violations.
VISIBILITY IS NEEDED to make APIDA detention and deportation under the Trump administration more widely understood among the broader American public. “Oftentimes, when we think about immigration enforcement, or when we think about immigration in America, it’s seen as a Latino issue and not an [APIDA] issue, when we know in fact our communities are also being devastated by the same policies and politics,” Dinh states. By challenging stereotypes of noncitizenship, undocumented status, and who is being targeted by ICE, it creates the space to uplift the underreported realities of APIDA communities.
Currently, APIDA communities are finding it difficult to speak up out of fear for their own safety. “The fear of actually talking with media now is much higher than we’ve ever seen,” Dinh continues. “The very real fear that community members have of ICE retribution is really preventing them from sharing their stories for wider visibility.”
This chilling effect is particularly detrimental to visibility for APIDA individuals targeted by ICE, because, as Dinh shared with the Prospect, since APIDA communities are smaller in number, that has often equated to fewer stories being covered about their experiences.
“I think one element the media has been missing is the impact of deportation on the entire family unit,” she says. “Children are really being devastated by their parents being taken from them. I think the story and element of familial and community harm has not been heard enough.”
As APIDA communities continue to face racist persecution at the hands of ICE and the Trump administration, the least we can do is witness what is happening.
