By Kevin Lam and Nicole Eigbrett, Special to The Reporter
October 1, 2025
In early September, the Department of Homeland Security launched Patriot 2.0, a mass enforcement initiative that has already escalated arrests of immigrants across Boston and Massachusetts.
In our neighborhoods, families have been torn apart, workers have been detained at their workplaces, and entire communities are living in fear. These are deliberate acts of state violence, designed to displace immigrant families from their homes, neighborhoods, and livelihoods.
Patriot 2.0 comes on the heels of the Supreme Court’s emergency ruling that upheld ICE’s broad authority to target community members based on the color of their skin or the sound of their native tongue. Together, these actions give the Trump administration free rein to intensify its anti-immigrant agenda across the country.
While all immigrant communities are at risk, Asian and Southeast Asian families are facing heightened trauma and instability. For decades, Southeast Asian refugees have been singled out for detention and deportation, fueled by a dangerous “good vs. bad” immigrant narrative that deems some communities more worthy than others.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the War in Southeast Asia, a war the United States waged and for which it bears direct responsibility for the mass displacement of our communities from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
The US welcomed Southeast Asian refugees—the largest community ever to be resettled in this country—as a matter of foreign policy optics but never provided the resources for true resettlement and stability. Instead, our communities were concentrated in underfunded neighborhoods, overpoliced, criminalized, and targeted for incarceration and deportation.
We are witnessing history repeat itself. The sweeping detainments in our neighborhoods across Massachusetts, including seven Asian American Resource Workshop (AARW) members in Dorchester, echo the largest workplace immigration action in over two decades, when federal officials detained more than 450 Korean and Latine workers at a Hyundai plant in Georgia.
This coordinated violence sends the clear message that this administration will stop at nothing to advance its cruel anti-immigrant, anti-American agenda.
What we know is that when we criminalize immigrants, we destabilize neighborhoods, and when families live in fear, children struggle in school, workers cannot safely get to their jobs, and neighbors retreat from civic life—making our city less safe for everyone.
As co-executive directors of AARW, we see both the pain and the resilience in our community every day. Our members know the trauma of displacement intimately, but they also know the power of organizing. We resist not only for our own families in the pan-Asian diaspora, but because we understand that the same systems harming us—criminalization, deportation, mass incarceration—are harming Black, Brown, and working-class communities everywhere.
Patriot 2.0 is the continuation of a 50-year cycle of forced displacement that the US government set in motion. If our country is serious about learning from history, it must stop repeating it. The immigrant families who call Boston home are not disposable. We deserve safety, dignity, and the ability to live free from fear. That means actively rejecting and resisting policies like Patriot 2.0 and instead investing in the housing, jobs, and resources that actually keep communities whole.
We know another future is possible because our community members are building it every day. And we invite you to join us.
Kevin Lam and Nicole Eigbrett are co-executive directors of the Asian American Resource Workshop (AARW), a Dorchester-based organization that has been serving as Boston’s Pan-Asian movement home for 45 years.