Ny Nourn was born in a Thai refugee camp. When she was five years old, Ny and her mother fled the Khmer Rouge, the genocidal regime responsible for the deaths of 2 million Cambodians. At 18 years old, Ny was sentenced to life in prison for her role in a murder perpetrated by her ex-boyfriend, a man twice her age who violently abused her. After 16 years in incarceration, Ny was paroled in 2017 but her time in the criminal legal system was far from over. She was immediately arrested by ICE as she walked out of the prison.
“So many times, judges, prosecutors, and police have refused to believe in my experience as a survivor. These very same institutions claim to protect survivors, yet fill prisons and detention centers with us... For the past 16 years, ICE and prisons have done my abuser’s work of punishing me for him. Before prison, he isolated me from my community, controlled where I could go, who I could talk to, and what I could wear. While incarcerated, prisons and ICE have done the same thing to me,” said Ny.
Ny is one of the 1.2 million Southeast Asian refugees who fled war and genocide in their home countries and arrived on U.S. soil. They were resettled in impoverished neighborhoods with failing schools, few social services, and limited economic opportunities. Racial profiling and over-policing were commonplace. Struggling with trauma from living through unspeakable violence and with little support in a country they did not know, a generation of young Southeast Asian men and women--many still children--turned to violence and crime to survive. Instead of receiving resources or help, they faced a punitive and discriminatory criminal legal system.
Today, Southeast Asian Americans account for 14% of the Asian American population and among the lowest income--over 18% of Cambodian families and 27% of Hmong families live below the poverty line, compared with 11% of US families overall.
Nearly 15,000 Southeast Asian refugees who resettled since the 1970s face deportations and permanent separations from their families in the U.S. as a direct result of mass incarceration and the federal immigration enforcement system. According to a Syracuse University study, Southeast Asian Americans are three to five times more likely to be deported due to an old criminal conviction compared with other immigrants in the U.S.
For the past 20 years, ALC has been at the forefront of a growing movement to protect Southeast Asian refugees facing deportations. We do this work because of people like Ny, and we center their experiences and leadership in our advocacy. On June 26, 2020, we celebrated as Ny was formally pardoned by Governor Gavin Newsom. As a Yuri Kochiyama Fellow at ALC, which is a fellowship for directly impacted formerly incarcerated immigrant community leaders, Ny worked with organizations, lawmakers and communities to advance and implement legislation impacting incarcerated immigrants, refugees and their families and communities. Ny then became a community advocate with our Immigrant Rights Program, and has recently been named the co-director of Asian Prisoners Support Community, a close community partner.
We don’t do this work alone. In coalition with a wide swath of organizations, we work to end the prison-to-deportation pipeline and promote restorative justice as an alternative to punitive approaches to criminal justice. In the last ten years, we have passed legislation to:
- Limit the use of state and local resources and personnel for immigration enforcement
- Require transparency and an opportunity for community engagement when local law enforcement participates in controversial ICE deportation programs
- Limits local jails from holding people for extra time, solely for deportation purpose and in violation of constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure
We also issued a report in August 2020 with Human Impact Partners that underscores the health impacts of ICE transfers on Southeast Asian refugees.
As long as Southeast Asian refugees are still incarcerated, facing deportation at the end of their long sentences, we know our work isn’t over. We will continue to work towards severing the local jail and prison to ICE pipeline, including through passage of the VISION Act (AB 937), and advocating for pardons for impacted Southeast Asian refugee community members.
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