This story was originally published in The Current.
In the Laotian Sou Khuan ceremony, a string is tied around participants’ wrists, in a ritual meant to preserve good luck and well-being by calling out to the spirits of their ancestors. Common across Southeast Asia, the ritual is often performed in moments of great change in a person’s life — marriage, childbirth or a big professional leap.
Phanat Xanamane, a community activist and artist in New Iberia, remembers wearing the string around his wrist when he left his home in New Iberia for grad school in New York.
“Looking down and seeing those strings on your wrist is a definite reminder of where you come from, who you are, and the people that love you and support you,” Xanamane says. “It’s a reminder that you have a community behind your back.”
When members of the Wat Thammarattanaram temple in Iberia Parish came together on a recent Sunday afternoon to take part in the ceremony, it seemed timely. For decades, Laotians have lived in the area, many harvesting peppers or shelling crawfish for a living, raising families and building a community along the way.
Most arrived as refugees as part of an official resettlement process, giving them legal status at the time of their arrival, and have been legal permanent residents ever since, with some applying for citizenship once they became eligible.
As legal residents, most didn’t have much to worry about as far as immigration enforcement was concerned.
But an aggressive deportation push by the Trump administration has stirred fear in this deeply rooted South Louisiana community. While the administrative realities of deporting Laotian refugees —and many other immigrants — are complicated, those threatened by it are forced to grapple with the possibility of leaving home and family behind.
A secret war
The Vietnam War is one of America’s most well-studied, culturally relevant foreign military engagements, the subject of too many books, movies and newspaper articles to count. But in its shadow, a U.S. intervention took place that much of the American public knows little about.
Laos, a small kingdom of a few million inhabitants at the time, took an officially neutral stance toward the conflict raging in neighboring Vietnam, although a similar battle of ideologies was being fought on its turf — largely facilitated by the Central Intelligence Agency, the largest paramilitary operation in the agency’s history.
But its proclaimed neutrality and cooperation with the Americans didn’t save Laos from becoming a victim of its geographic location. From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. military dropped two million tons of cluster bombs on Laos — more than all the bombs dropped in World War II combined.
The people of Laos, many of them rice farmers and other agricultural workers, fled the internal conflict and American carpet bombing, mostly to neighboring Thailand. The U.S. didn’t succeed in pushing back the communist insurgents of Pathet Lao. Following the 1975 communist takeover, many more Laotians left their homes. In Thailand, they dwelled in refugee camps, hoping to return one day or looking for a way out.
In 1980 alone, 100,000 Laotians were resettled from Thai refugee camps, most of them to the U.S., where church and community groups sponsored them for resettlement, and they became permanent residents, with a path to citizenship down the line.
This is how one Laotian man arrived in South Louisiana. Having spent his early childhood in a refugee camp in Thailand, he arrived in San Francisco with his family in 1986. They soon resettled in South Louisiana, where they had family and a community. He was issued a green card, the document proving his right to live and work in the U.S.
Then, on a July day in 1997, everything changed.
Now 46, he recounts shooting a gun into the air at 17-years-old. A dumb move, for sure, but luckily no one got hurt. But that didn’t shield him from consequences. He was charged with aggravated assault for firing the 9mm handgun and entered a plea deal. Police records from the time are longer available.
What he didn’t know was that by pleading guilty, he had put his immigration status at risk. While considered proof of “permanent residency,” a green card is a provisional document and the status it confers is subject to revocation for a number of reasons, including criminal charges or failure to renew the card.
After being released from jail, the man, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of raising his profile with immigration authorities, was transferred to an immigration detention facility in Oakdale, La.
He spent two years in immigration detention, appealing his case to an immigration judge to no avail. As a result, the government wanted to deport him, but there was one problem — the U.S. doesn’t have a repatriation agreement with Laos. He was paroled and went on with his life in Iberia Parish.
Limbo
In practical terms, refugees arrive in the U.S. in one of two ways. They may flee a country where they feel their life or liberty is under threat and enter the U.S., legally or illegally, to claim asylum. Being on U.S. soil is a requirement for claiming asylum, while the resettlement process usually starts abroad, often in refugee camps.
The other way for refugees to arrive in the country is the refugee resettlement process, in which refugees who have fled to a country of relative safety, such as Thailand was for fleeing Laotians, can apply to be resettled elsewhere.
However refugees arrive, their eligibility for deportation, should they lose their permission to stay in the country, is in part determined by diplomatic relationships between the U.S. and the refugees’ country of origin.
Historically, Laos has rarely issued travel documents for deportation. In response, in July 2018, the U.S. placed sanctions on the Laotian government, including a stop on issuing visas for certain high-level Lao government officials, in an effort to force them to cooperate with U.S. deportation policy.
The Laotian government subsequently agreed to issue a limited number of travel documents each year, but deportations to the country remain rare. According to the Asian Law Caucus, there are currently over 4,800 Laotians considered deportable by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement living in the U.S.
The 47-year-old from South Louisiana is one of them. After the government was unable to deport him to Laos, where he had spent a mere two years of his life, he was paroled. In the decades to follow, he built a life in the U.S., got married and started a family, all while attending regular check-ins with ICE to inform them about his whereabouts.
A recent call-in letter to a local ICE office didn’t come as a shock — he had been checking in with immigration authorities every other year or so since he was released from detention. But the current climate around immigration did make him wary. He brought an attorney and a friend to the appointment, in case he would be detained again and needed someone to drive his car back.
He wasn’t. But the situation once again made him reflect on the threat he has faced for decades, of losing the life he has built over a teenage mistake. He worried how his wife and three children would fare if he suddenly disappeared.
“It was wrong, what I did,” he says. “But can you hold this against me for the rest of my life? There’s no way out of it.” The uncertainty of his long-lasting parole, he says, amounts to “double-jeopardy” — being tried for the same crime twice.
Since then, he has heard from others in his situation that they were given ankle monitors and were required to apply for permission for seeking work considered outside of their area of residence.
Unsettled
It’s cases like his that call into question whether Trump’s declared goal of mass deportations is actually achievable. Since the start of his second administration, arrests of immigrants have picked up, but deportations have lagged, leading to high numbers of immigrants detained in a growing number of detention facilities across the country.
But that doesn’t stop those in local immigrant communities from worrying about their neighbors, friends and family members. Even without a criminal record, something that may have seemed a small error in the past — such as failing to submit an application for a green card renewal — may put someone at risk of deportation or at least long-term detention in increasingly crowded facilities.
Many in his community, much of which remains working class, don’t fully grasp the administrative processes of the immigration system, Xanamane says.
“I’ve had several people, families, reach out to me and other knowledgeable young people — more white collar professionals, lawyers, community organizers — and say: can you help us? I have a son, I have a cousin, I have a husband, et cetera, that may be in danger of being deported,” he says.
The memory of living under an oppressive regime has made many older Laotian refugees additionally fearful of engaging with government officials, causing many to forgo their opportunity to apply for citizenship, a more protective status, and remaining permanent residents instead.
It also has caused political subjects to be somewhat taboo at the kitchen table, notes Xanamane, who’s first name is that of the Thai refugee camp where he was born. This, he feels, has to change given the current circumstances.
“We have a voice and we have concerns that apply to our community, and we want to make sure that we’re protected,” he says. “My goal is just not to have my community, the families in my community, be torn apart.”