ICE actions against AAPI immigrants are surging. California is a hot spot
Manpreet Singh was one of the many asylum-seeking immigrants and DACA recipients with valid documents who were among the 17,000 commercial drivers whose licenses were canceled by California in 2025 amid pressure from the Trump administration.
We’ve all seen the videos and pictures of people being dragged away by armed and masked U.S. government agents. The militarization of immigration enforcement will be the defining legacy of the Trump administration.
Latinos are by far the most common target of these dragnets. That makes it easy to see why some view immigration as a Latino issue. But immigrants of all stripes are at risk.
An analysis of new data should sound the alarm bells for the Bay Area’s large Asian American and Pacific Islander population: Actions have spiked sharply for these groups under the Trump administration.
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Since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, arrests, detentions and deportations of Asians are up to 10 times higher than the overall rate of enforcement actions compared to an equivalent period at the end of the Biden administration, according to an analysis of government statistics and a data tracker released Tuesday by the group Stop AAPI Hate.
“When the country talks about who is being harmed by the administration’s immigration agenda, Asian and Pacific Islanders are left out of the conversation,” Cynthia Choi, co-director of Stop AAPI Hate, said Tuesday during a Zoom press conference. “This is why we have built the tracker we’re launching today, because data makes the invisible visible. You cannot fight what you cannot see.”
Under the Trump........
