In February 2026, a historic bill entered Congress: the Southeast Asian Deportation Relief Act (SEADRA). Though its name may sound generic, the lives it touches number in the thousands, and the story behind it spans decades of war, exile, survival, and resistance. SEADRA is not just legislation; it is a moral reckoning with America’s history and a chance to right generations of harm, even in this moment and intense attack on immigrants.
SEADRA seeks to end the detention and deportation of Cambodian, Laotian, Hmong, and Vietnamese refugees who arrived in the United States by 2008—people who have called America home for nearly 50 years. It would also grant permanent work authorization, replace harmful in-person ICE check-ins with virtual check-ins, and crucially, create pathways for those already deported to return and reunite with their families.
How we got here
We are here because the United States waged war in Southeast Asia. The U.S. dropped 7.5 million tons of bombs in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam—twice the amount used during WWII. More than 1 million of us Southeast Asian people were displaced and resettled in the U.S., often in already neglected Black and brown neighborhoods, with little support and few resources.
Instead of receiving real investment, these neighborhoods were targeted by racist, anti-Black policies that criminalized poverty and over-policed young people of color. Southeast Asian youth, trying to survive in unsafe and under-resourced environments, were swept into the criminal legal system. Many made not the best choices, but served their time, and believed they had paid their debt to society. Many were not informed properly of their rights in the criminal justice system and others were asked to just sign papers, with little explanations. These papers later turned out to be agreements for removal orders.
But in 1996, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act changed the rules. Old convictions suddenly became grounds for detention and deportation. Refugees who had lived here for decades—who had U.S. citizen children, jobs, and community—were picked up by immigration officers and told they would be sent back to countries they left as children. Some do not speak the language of the country they’re being deported to, and others never knew that country because they were infants when they left.
Today, at least 15,000 Southeast Asians have been detained or deported, and Southeast Asian Americans are three to five times more likely to be deported for an old conviction than people from any other immigrant communities. This is not a coincidence or an accident. It is a policy choice of double punishment.
Escalation and abuse of power
In recent years, our communities saw mass deportation where, in a single sweep, as many as 160 people were taken—disappeared into detention, then deported, leaving families scrambling to figure out what happened overnight. The Hmong community, many of whom fought alongside the U.S. in the “Secret War” in Laos and are often treated as stateless, have been pushed into this new round of deportation crisis. Their experiences beg the questions: What does it mean to be deported to a country that does not even recognize you as its own citizen? What does it mean to live in a world where no country claims you, and the only home you know threatens to expel you? In 2025, the numbers of Hmong and Lao people deported is more than the previous 13 years combined. (source: https://deportationdata.org/data/ice.html)
We’ve seen horrifying examples of this disregard for our humanity—including cases where people were deported to third countries they had never lived in, after serving decades in prison, as if their lives were disposable once their labor and suffering were used up. Like that of Tuan Phan, a resident of Tacoma, Washington, who was deported to South Sudan after completing a 25 years sentence. His case and others are examples of this administration abusing its power by testing its limit on the most vulnerable.
Our communities have always been our refuge
Despite all of this, Southeast Asian communities have never stopped fighting for each other. For more than 25 years, Khmer folks and directly impacted people—those who have been detained, deported, or have loved ones inside—have been at the center of organizing efforts. Organizers like those from the Khmer Anti-deportation and Advocacy Group (KhAAG) in Seattle, helped impacted community members navigate the immigrant justice system and fight their deportation cases.
Local and grassroots organizers across the country have built rapid response teams, mutual aid networks, legal clinics, and community care systems drawing lessons from our own survival. Lessons from our elders building temples and churches. Aunties watching neighborhood kids while parents worked multiple jobs. Community money pots helped launch small businesses that turned into vibrant cultural districts.
We have also taken our fight to the international stage. We have testified at United Nations human rights reviews, naming U.S. deportation policies for what they are: human rights violations. How can a country bomb a region, uproot its people, resettle them in poverty, watch them struggle to survive, and then punish them again for doing what any human being would do—try to live?
In 2022, after decades of organizing, the Southeast Asian Freedom Network (SEAFN) and its national partners launched the Southeast Asian Relief and Responsibility (SEARR) campaign. This campaign includes four legislative bills that call on the U.S. to take responsibility for its role in destabilizing Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, and to provide real relief to people targeted for detention and deportation. SEADRA is one of the four bills, and it is championed through SEAFN’s sibling organization Southeast Asian Action (SEA Action), which is a national political C4 entity. It was first introduced in 2023 and again this year.
Why this moment matters
Under the current administration, our communities have been used to test the limits of how far immigration enforcement can go. The SEARR campaign gives us a chance to push back—not just in the halls of Congress, but in our own living rooms, temples, churches, and community centers.
This campaign helps us challenge harmful myths: that there are “good” and “bad” immigrants, that people are defined forever by the worst thing they’ve done, that punishment is the only way to respond to harm. We know from experience that when people’s basic needs are met – housing, work, health care, community – crime and violence go down. When families stay together, neighborhoods are safer and stronger.
SEADRA is one step toward changing our material conditions: ending the constant fear of detention, creating stability through work authorization, and opening doors for return and reunification. It also creates space for a deeper narrative shift in our communities – about the legacies of war, the school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline, and the long history of Southeast Asian resistance.
Nobody is disposable
At the heart of this struggle is a simple belief: nobody is disposable. SEAFN and countless community members refuse to accept a world where our loved ones can be taken from us and sent away forever. We believe in abolition—not as an empty slogan, but as a way of imagining safety, justice, and accountability beyond prisons, cages, and deportation flights.
SEADRA is not the end of the road. It is one important tool in a much larger movement to heal from war, displacement, and criminalization. It is a way of saying that our communities—Cambodian, Hmong, Lao, Vietnamese, and all those standing with us—deserve to live with dignity, security, and joy.
If we believe that families belong together, that people deserve second chances, and that a country that caused harm has a responsibility to repair it, then we must stand behind SEADRA. Call your representatives. Talk to your neighbors. Share your family’s story.
Our communities have always been our own refuge. Now, together, we have a chance to make that refuge permanent.
