Community-Centered Response

For decades, the Asian Law Caucus has centered the needs of survivors of hateful violence, particularly state violence and oppression. We work side-by-side survivors, defending their rights, repairing harm, and enacting policy change to prevent future trauma and violence. In the early 1970s, the San Francisco Police Department targeted Chinatown youth with discriminatory dragnets. We stepped in and filed one of our first lawsuits, Chann v. Scott, successfully ending the unconstitutional arrests. In the face of unconscionable and heartbreaking hate violence and harassment that targets Black, Indigenous, and Asian community members, our teams continue to center healing and community safety as we work intensively to address the root causes of racialized violence and a lack of safety in underserved communities.

Advancing California AAPI Communities’ Health and Safety

Across the Bay Area, we’re continuing to provide direct legal services to victims and survivors of anti-Asian hate. At the same time, we recognize that our criminal legal system is not designed to address many incidents of racism, let alone repair harm and prevent hate incidents from happening again. With support from the California Department of Social Services, we’re expanding our legal support and training on the criminal legal system for victims, survivors, and community organizations; working with criminal justice reform partners on violence prevention interventions, and helping victims exercise greater agency within current systems, particularly people who prefer non-dominant languages.

Many of our clients and their families endure discriminatory police surveillance, racial profiling, and violence as a result of local, state, and federal agencies’ targeting.

In San Francisco, we’re deepening our work with the other advocates and community members uniting against police surveillance and police violence, including organizing to reverse the Board of Supervisors’ initial approval and stop SFPD from using remote-controlled robots to kill people. Earlier in the year, we worked with other civil rights and racial justice organizations to narrow a sweeping policy that would give SFPD new powers to spy on San Francisco residents while we commute to work, visit healthcare providers, attend religious services, and more.

Our work locally is also informing our class action lawsuit with Hmong American and other Asian American community members in Siskiyou County. Alongside the ACLU of Northern California and pro bono firm Covington & Burling LLP, we’re seeking to end Siskiyou County’s systematic campaign of racist hostility and persecution that is being waged in an effort to isolate community members of Asian descent and drive them out of the region. For more than a year, we partnered with residents to investigate the county’s practices, including restricting Asian Americans’ right to water and executing unlawful traffic stops, search and seizure practices, and property liens. At the same time, we supported another active case and filed a series of amicus briefs that helped establish a preliminary injunction against two of the discriminatory and inhumane water restrictions.

Dismantling Anti-Asian Racism Under the Pretext of National Security

Amid unwavering community outrage, the Justice Department announced an end to the controversial “China Initiative” in February 2022. While this was a step in the right direction, the Biden administration must continue on this path, including a full-scale change that ends profiling on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, and religion.

From Pennsylvania to Tennessee to California, people of Chinese, Arab, Middle Eastern, and South Asian descent are finding solidarity in their shared struggle to overcome xenophobia and anti-Asian racism that operates under the cover of so-called national security. With more than 70 Asian American organizations and partners across the country, we filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit supporting Temple University professor Dr. Xiaoxing Xi’s case to hold the government accountable for this unconscionable and unconstitutional prosecutions. During the hearing this past fall, the judges seemed persuaded that Dr. Xi and his family endured “malicious prosecution and fabrication” of evidence and expressed considerable skepticism with the Department of Justice’s arguments claiming immunity from accountability for violating people’s rights and freedoms.

As we await the ruling, we’re continuing to monitor Congressional proposals that could enhance or expand federal agencies’ powers to use race, ethnicity, national origin, and religious beliefs as a basis to question people’s loyalty, undermine our safety, and instill fear. In 2022, we mobilized Asian American groups across the country to defeat legislative amendments from Senator Portman that would have given the government more tools to target and profile our communities, once in the CHIPS+ bill and again in the National Defense Authorization Act.

Ending Anti-Asian Hate of ICE Transfers

For years, the Asian Law Caucus has represented Southeast Asian refugees as well as Latine and Black community members who have criminal convictions, served their time, and are fighting cruel deportation orders. Many Southeast Asian refugees fled war and genocide as young children and then faced anti-Asian bullying and violence in under-resourced neighborhoods in the U.S. As a result, some joined gangs as youth for protection, which created situations where they also made mistakes and were then tried and sentenced as adults. After serving their sentence, being granted parole, or having charges dropped, these community members face the double punishment of ICE detention and deportation. Instead of coming back home to their loved ones, their families are living with unabated pain and separation. Without community-centered solutions and a reimagining of our criminal legal system, these cycles of trauma and harm never end.

In spite of these barriers to safety and justice, we celebrated many movement victories with community members and advocates across the state. In 2022, Vithea Yung and Yeng Lee came home instead of being detained and potentially deported. Eleven years after she was deported, Sophea Phea became the first Cambodian community member to return home through a governor’s pardon. These and many other beautiful moments of reconnection and repair are also inspiring more and more people to take action and urge their elected representatives to end ICE transfers in California once and for all.