Item 21 - Assembly Bill 937 (the “VISION Act”)

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AB 937 Page 9 communities inflicted by ICE that motivated the Legislature to enact SB 54 began long before the Trump administration and still persists today. The recent rise in violence directed at the Asian Pacific Islander (API) Community is the latest development in a long history of bias and violence against marginalized communities, including by abuse of the immigration system. While the media and the public have focused on the recent rise of traumatic and horrendous interpersonal acts of violence against Asian and Pacific Islander American community members, it is also important to also recognize the less discussed large - scale and multi-generational impact of systemic violence against API communities. At such a time, California would be remiss to not reflect on and address its role in the criminalization, family separation, and perpetual punishment of API refugee communities. Southeast Asian refugees have been especially impacted by mass incarceration, ICE transfers, and deportation. U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and U.S.-led carpet bombing in Southeast Asia caused mass migration of refugees from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam to California. Southeast Asian refugees who resettled in California were generally housed in poor, hyper-criminalized, and under-resourced neighborhoods with little to no culturally competent support services. Southeast Asian refugee children – like other immigrants -- faced intense bullying. At the same time, all of these youth as well as those who were Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) struggled to survive the 1990s — a decade marked by a proliferation of local and national “tough on crime” policies, including mandatory minimum sentences, the “war on drugs” and sentencing children as adults in criminal proceedings. In 1996, U.S. Congress passed an immigration bill that severely limited immigration relief for non-U.S. citizens with criminal convictions — including refugees and green card holders. By the time Southeast Asian refugee children, whose families survived famine and genocide, were teenagers, the school to prison to deportation pipeline was in full effect. The perfect storm of draconian criminal justice and immigration laws resulted in not only the mass incarceration of the immigrant and BIPOC communities, but also the mass deportation of Central American, South American, and Southeast Asian refugees. Today, Southeast Asian refugees are at least three times more likely to be deported for past convictions than other immigrant communities are. In 2018, at least 16,000 of the 2.7 million Southeast Asians in the United States had received final deportation orders, more than 13,000 of which were based on past criminal records (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, “U.S. Deportation Outcomes by Charge, Completed Cases in Immigration Courts”, available at http://trac.syr.edu/phptools/immigration/court_backlog/deport_outcome_charge.php ). This means that 80% of the total Southeast Asian deportation orders were linked to old criminal records, compared to 29% of all immigrants with deportation orders. (Ibid) Between 2017 and 2018, there was a 279% spike in deportations of Cambodian refugees and a 58% increase in the deportations of Vietnamese refugees (Ibid). This targeting of the Southeast Asian refugee community has continued under the Biden administr ation. On March 15, 2021, the same week as the horrific Atlanta mass shooting that targeted Asian women and during President Biden’s moratorium on deportations, 33 Vietnamese refugee community members were tragically deported. Among those deported were individuals who fought alongside U.S. troops during the Vietnam War. According to a report released just last week by the International Rescue Committee, the United States is on track to accept the fewest refugees this year of any modern president, including