A central focus of the convention was the changing landscape of Asian American reporting. Sessions encouraged journalists to move beyond episodic coverage and produce deeper, more nuanced reporting that reflects the diversity, complexity, and lived experiences of AAPI communities. Throughout the conference, speakers emphasized that authentic relationships with communities are essential to accurate and meaningful journalism.

During one of the convention’s featured sessions, Asian American Unity Coalition presented: “From Crisis to Coalition: Lessons from the Front Lines.” Anjuli Cameron, CEO of SEWA-AIFW, and Ted Fong, Executive Director of AAUC, examined how Minnesota’s cross-sector coalition responded during Operation Metro Surge by bringing together immigrant organizations, elected officials, faith leaders, legal advocates, and community organizations to protect civil rights. Participants explored practical lessons in coalition building and discussed how journalists can better understand and report on communities responding to crisis through collective action.

Anjuli Cameron, CEO of SEWA-AIFW and Ted Fong, Executive Director of AAUC, gave a presentation on the Minnesota Model of Cross-Sector Coalition Building.

Artificial intelligence emerged as another dominant topic. Presenters explored the responsible use of AI, demonstrating how newsrooms can use AI to improve research, transcription, translation, and production workflows while maintaining strict editorial oversight. The consensus was that AI should enhance, not replace, the judgment, ethics, and accountability of professional journalists.

The convention also highlighted the industry’s transition toward digital-first storytelling, with sessions examining video, podcasts, newsletters, mobile platforms, and social media strategies for reaching younger audiences. Speakers emphasized that while distribution platforms continue to evolve, strong reporting and compelling storytelling remain journalism’s greatest assets.

The opening session showcased the enduring value of investigative and local journalism through a discussion of the Baltimore Banner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into Baltimore’s overdose crisis. The panel demonstrated how local accountability reporting can expose systemic failures and create lasting public impact.

Other sessions focused on reporting with community expertise, encouraging journalists to build trust with the people they cover rather than simply reporting from outside their communities. Workshops on misinformation and verification provided practical tools for fact-checking, authenticating AI-generated images and videos, and strengthening public confidence through transparency and rigorous verification practices.

Recognizing the pressures facing today’s newsrooms, AAJA also devoted significant attention to journalist safety and resilience, addressing burnout, trauma, mental health, layoffs, and career sustainability in an increasingly demanding profession.

AAUC and Cambodian American Partnership of MN sponsored the Welcome Reception.

Veteran journalist Ann Curry was among the convention’s most influential voices. BOMBSHELL, the documentary she narrated, examined how the U.S. government shaped public narratives surrounding the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Following the screening, Curry joined director Ben Loeterman, producer Gaia De Simoni, photojournalist Darrell Miho, and moderator David Ono for a thoughtful discussion on historical framing, media responsibility, and the journalist’s obligation to pursue truth.

Curry also headlined the Gala Scholarship & Awards Banquet, where she received AAJA’s 2026 Visibility Award. In a conversation with MSNBC anchor Richard Lui, she reflected on identity, storytelling, and journalism’s public service mission. She urged journalists to fight for stories that matter most and reminded attendees that reporters must strive to be “worthy of a profession like journalism,” one that carries the profound responsibility of telling other people’s stories.

Closing the convention, outgoing AAJA President Nicole Dungca summarized the gathering’s purpose: “As the media industry continues to change rapidly, and journalism and democracy around the world are under pressure, AAJA’s role in supporting and connecting AAPI journalists is more necessary than ever.” Her remarks reflected the convention’s overarching message: while technology and newsrooms continue to evolve, journalism’s future will be defined by integrity, innovation, and trusted reporting.

Read AAJA’s coverage of the AAJA2026.

Vietnam

Hanna began with Vietnam, the war that perhaps most durably shaped the Americans’ pessimistic view of war and later the demographic map of cities across the U.S. “First, you have the justification, which was to stop the spread of communism,” Jack said. “Then you have escalation, and then came the overwhelming military deployments.” Millions of soldiers and civilians died. The Khmer Rouge’s rise and the resulting killing fields became a catastrophe in itself, claiming two million Cambodian lives. This produced its own wave of refugees in the years that followed.

“Once you go into a country that is not your own to fight a war, you have to develop alliances and relationships with the people in the community there,” Hanna said. “And if you lose the war and retreat, those people are at risk.” The obligation to those allies was real, he argued, but the plan to honor it was almost entirely absent. “We had no specific plan how to assist them thereafter.”

What emerged from that failure of planning was the U.S. Refugee Act of 1980 and the creation of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the modern framework for absorbing displaced populations, built not from foresight but from a moral reckoning after the fact. “That began the system, so to speak, of how we have these immigrants come to the United States and be absorbed and acclimated,” The system has improved over the decades, he acknowledged, but it remains far short of what a best-case response would look like.

Somalia

Somalia, Hanna said, represented a somewhat different kind of intervention, one driven as much by humanitarian crisis as by ideology. A devastating famine and a civil war had torn the country apart by the early 1990s, and the United States entered in 1992 ostensibly to stabilize the situation. But he was careful not to reduce it to simple altruism. “Many times there are other factors involved that are above and beyond just ideological political matters, including corruption, including famine, and other countries’ ulterior motives for their own political and economic purposes.”

The result was nearly 98,000 Somali immigrants eventually making their way to the United States, with the largest concentration settling in Minnesota, a fact that would loom over the broader discussion of the ICE incursions (the topic that AAUC upcoming summit in Minneapolis plans to address). What distinguished the Somali community, he argued, was the degree to which it had organized itself. “There was a high rate of naturalization that occurred for them, and that is very, very unique, and I think a reflection of the strength of the self-organization that the community has gone through.” It was a point that would echo later, when Kim Sin held up the Somali community as a model his own Cambodian community was still striving to emulate.

Iraq and Afghanistan

Hanna grouped the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan together, not because they were identical, but because they shared a common origin point and a common pattern of consequences. Both were launched in the wake of September 11, 2001, though the justifications diverged sharply.

The Iraq War, he said, was sold to the American public and to Congress on the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. “Did not exist,” Hanna said flatly. “A complete failure as far as the justification is concerned.” The humanitarian consequences were staggering: over 600,000 Iraqis killed, millions more displaced. American forces withdrew in 2011, only to return in 2013 and 2014 when the vacuum they left was filled by ISIS. “We still have about 2,000 troops there,” he noted, a presence that continues without a clear endgame, two decades after the original invasion.

Afghanistan presented what Hanna called a more defensible justification, given Al-Qaeda’s operational presence there following 9/11. But the outcome was similarly grim. Over 100,000 Afghan civilians died, along with 2,400 Americans. And the withdrawal, when it finally came in August 2021, was chaotic. The Taliban moved swiftly to consolidate power, and the Afghans who had spent years cooperating with American forces — translators, administrators, soldiers, civil society leaders — were left acutely exposed. “The consequence was disastrous,” Hanna said. “And we still suffer the consequences of that political, economic, and military defeat.”

More than 190,000 Afghans eventually immigrated to the United States on the grounds that they had assisted American efforts and that the U.S. bore a moral and legal obligation to protect them from Taliban retribution. But Hanna argued that obligation has since been abandoned. “Sadly, in my opinion, America has failed with regard to the obligations it has to the Afghans,” he said. “And now is not letting any of them in, and just this past week has decided to send them to the Congo.”

Syria

Hanna saved Syria for last, describing it as personal as it is the country of his own heritage. A civil war that ground on from 2011 to 2025 produced what he called one of the largest refugee crises in recent history: 13 million people displaced, 7 million of them driven across international borders. “It was one of the largest groups of refugees since WWII,” he said. The United States absorbed approximately 50,000 of those community members, a fraction of the total, and a number that has now effectively been reduced to zero under the current administration. “That has been practically completely terminated,” Hanna said, “as it is with the Afghans, since the new administration has come into power.”

Taken together, he argued, these four cases, and the dozens of other interventions that Fong would display in a closing slide, reveal something important about the relationship between American foreign policy and American demographics. “These are just some of the examples of what’s occurred in the past,” Hanna said. “There are common experiences. America goes into these wars, and what are the consequences of us leaving — and in many instances having failed military efforts — and the refugees and immigrants it creates? The lessons are there, if we choose to learn from them.”

Kim Sin’s Story

After Jack provided the historical context, the town hall’s guest speaker offered the human story behind it. Kim Sin is the co-founder of the Cambodian American Partnership of Minnesota and a longtime community advocate based in Rochester. He was three years old when his family fled Cambodia.

Describing his earliest memories of the camp on the Thai-Cambodian border, he said, “I thought that was my home. Then I got very curious, wanting to know why I could not leave the barbed wire fence.” His mother’s answer came slowly and heavily, Cambodia was under the Khmer Rouge, and because his father had been a soldier, the entire family would have been executed had they stayed. “My family had to take a risk and escape,” Sin said. “All the educated, all the wealthy, all the people with knowledge were executed because they were considered a risk and a rebellion against the new government. That’s why we are here.”

Sin spent three years moving between camps before being flown to the Philippines for six months of medical screening and processing. The camps were orderly in their way, governed by permission slips and barbed wire, rationed food and routine uncertainty. “Me and my sister would have to line up, holding the same bowl, and we would get a rice porridge,” he recalled. “My mom would sit in the sun, waiting for food distribution.” There was no school. There was no stability. There was only the next camp, and then the next.

Aid workers showed refugees American films, glimpses of a country that seemed almost fantastical. “It showed, like, it was heaven on earth,” Sin said with a laugh. “Big houses, mansions, luxury cars. I was just praying to come to the U.S.” He paused. “When I got to the U.S., the perspective that Hollywood portrayed was not the way that I imagined.”

Arriving in America

Kim was six years old when he landed in Rochester, Minnesota, speaking not a word of English. The support systems of the early 1980s were, by his account, almost nonexistent. “We didn’t have a really supported system in place back in the early 80s,” he said. “It was new to the U.S. government, they didn’t even have any structure.”

Families were required to report to government offices every three months to maintain healthcare and cash assistance, with little guidance on how to navigate those bureaucracies. Transportation was a constant problem. “We didn’t know how to use a taxi. We didn’t know how to use the transportation that a city offers. There was no one to help and guide our community.” Grocery stores were out of reach. The housing they were placed in was cheap, but it was also isolated. “They kind of threw us into a community,” Sin said. “They put us in the worst of the worst.”

Those who needed help getting to a doctor’s appointment had to pay out of pocket for assistance, a crushing burden. “If you had six people in your family, you’d have to pay more. The most would be $100, the least $40. But back in the 80s, that was a lot of money.” Even small costs added up to impossible math for families with no income, no language, and no map of the system they’d landed in.

And then there was the matter of who Sin was at home versus who he was expected to become at school. “I had to live in two cultures,” he said. “My parents were trying to pull me not to stray away from Cambodian culture, but at school, my peers, the environment — it was pulling me to live and be an American. It was very, very tough.”

The Weight That Carries Forward

Fong asked Sin to explain intergenerational trauma, which comes up in a lot of conversations he has with the Southeast Asian American community.

“A lot of the parents and grandparents were experiencing the Khmer Rouge War,” he said. “They saw people getting killed in front of them, family members executed in front of them. So coming to a new country, even though the kids are growing up here or born here, there’s a lot of restrictions.” The fear that had kept parents alive in Cambodia, including hypervigilance, secrecy, distrust, followed them into American living rooms and didn’t know how to stop. “The trauma of their past experience during the Khmer Rouge War carried on with them.”

When children pushed back, as American children do, parents often couldn’t distinguish normal adolescent independence from genuine danger. “They fear of losing their kid. They hear about kidnapping, people getting murdered in America. So the trauma just keeps going.” The result was a growing distance between generations, and within that distance, damage. “There’s a gap that keeps on pushing and pushing, and there’s tension, and there’s abuse in that, where the father feels the kid is not giving them respect. And when they come to a new country, the respect is gone.”

Fathers who had been engineers, lawyers, or government officials in Cambodia arrived in America to find that none of it transferred. “Doctors, lawyers, engineers — when they come here, they end up cleaning toilets, doing housekeeping work, because their status in Cambodia did not carry over,” Sin said. “Knowing that their status as a toilet cleaner is an embarrassment for them, it was tough. They feel degraded.” Without professional standing, without language, without a pathway back to the life they had known, some turned to alcohol, gambling, or worse. Their children watched. “Parents become alcoholic, they have gambling issues, and that makes it harder for the younger generation — they’re being pulled and prevented from moving on.”

Yen Marshall, the AAUC’s board president, joined the conversation. She and her family fled Vietnam by boat. “Depending on how we left that situation, we have a different view on how to kind of move forward,” she said. But she also described a dynamic that played out in households across every immigrant community on the call: children who learned English faster than their parents suddenly found the family’s power structure quietly, uncomfortably reversed. “In a short time, your kids know more than you, they’d be your translator when you go and ask for help. With that table turned around, the frustration builds, and when they’re not doing things the way that you feel they should, the conflict inside the house is huge.” Her father, who had run his own business in Vietnam and employed multiple people, arrived in America washing dishes in a restaurant. The shame and disorientation of that fall, she said, had nowhere to go. “There’s no way for them to communicate it out.”

The consequences showed up in statistics that still trouble Sin today. “In the 80s and 90s, there was a high number of suicides. We see a lot of young generation, they shot themselves, they couldn’t deal with the issues at home.” Girls dropped out of school, became pregnant in junior high. Boys joined gangs. “They were using a high number of drugs that was causing them to be suicidal, and some of them overdosed. Some of them died in their cars, sleeping in the car.” He paused. “That was a big issue within our community.”

Fong asked about the comparison to other Southeast Asian immigrant communities and whether Cambodians had fared differently than Vietnamese or Hmong Americans. Sin didn’t soften his answer. “We are considered the lowest and least educated community. The last time I got the report, 58% of Cambodians are failing in school.” He attributed part of this to a wound that is uniquely Cambodian.

Michael Siv, a Sacramento-based advocate and filmmaker whose own family fled Cambodia, joined the conversation, offering this grim distinction, “The Khmer Rouge is our own people. A quarter of the population massacred. There’s not a lot of dialogue about when your own kind just massacred your whole country.” He drew a pointed contrast with other refugee communities. “The Hmong can blame America, they can blame Laos or the Vietnamese government. But for Cambodians, nobody really talks about it. Your own people pretty much just massacred your whole country. So, there’s a mistrust in creating that conversation.” That silence, he argued, has made the communal reckoning necessary for healing almost impossible to begin, and has contributed to a fragmentation that distinguishes the Cambodian American experience from that of other Southeast Asian communities. Sin agreed: “It’s very hard and emotional for the elderly to share. A lot of tears. A lot of complication. We try, slowly, to get them to share their feeling about their past.”

What Healing Looks Like

Fong turned the conversation toward recovery, asking what communities and organizations are doing to address the psychological burden carried across generations. The responses from around the call converged on a single word: community.

Charlene Reyes, 19, a Sacramento member of the youth organization Young and Rooted and the daughter of immigrant parents said, “I can’t say much about what the older generation is doing to find healing,” she said. “But I know that even in the younger generation, kids my age, kids younger than me, they are affected by our parents’ past and the trauma they went through. It’ll always be with us, throughout the generations.” What has helped, she said, is simply not being alone in it. “A lot of kids of immigrants — I’m first generation, my mom was an immigrant, my dad’s an immigrant — it shows that there’s a lot of people, a lot of kids, that have parents that are like that. I’ve seen it help a lot of these kids. I’ve seen it help myself. To know that we all have the same sort of struggles, similar enough that we can understand each other without even talking about it.”

Yen Marshall echoed that, drawing on her own experience as a boat refugee from Vietnam. She described a particular burden that many first-generation immigrants carry but rarely name: survivor’s guilt. “A lot of people died on that journey leaving,” she said. “Being the survivors, we felt very lucky already. But what about all those who died and couldn’t make it?” That guilt, she argued, became a kind of fuel. “Part of the immigrants, the generation that came here, felt that it was their responsibility to make a difference, not just in their own lives, their family, but the community surrounding them.” Building up the community, she said, was how many first-generation immigrants processed what they had survived. But communication remained the great obstacle. The trauma left people frustrated and inarticulate, unable to express what they carried. “There’s no way for them to communicate it out.”

What she came back to, ultimately, was the same thing Charlene had said, and the same thing Kim Sin had said: the need for places where people can simply be together without explaining themselves. “Community is a place to unwind, to reconnect, to take a breather — even from your own family,” Marshall said. “Building a strong community where new immigrants, or even older immigrants who’ve been here for a while, can reach out and lean on you — I think that’s one of the best ways to move forward.”

Building the Basket Back

Sin closed the meeting with a message that was honest about the scale of the problem and clear-eyed about what it will take. The Cambodian community, he said, is like “a broken basket, we’re trying to weave that basket back together, but it’s just hard to pull that bamboo string back. It’s going to take many, many generations.”

His own model of leadership, he explained, is rooted in this: “I don’t need your money, but I need your participation. That’s the difference.” Through the Rochester Cultural Center, which he helped found, and through his work connecting with Somali, Vietnamese, and Hmong leaders across Minnesota, he has been studying what makes other communities resilient. “I see why they are so successful. It’s because they know how to support each other. And that’s what our Cambodian community needs.”

He saved his most direct words for the broader audience — for the non-immigrants and policymakers and fellow advocates on the call. “It’s hard to live in a situation where your family’s not educated, where your family doesn’t have the resources. We need to help them in a way that lets them move forward and be able to live the American dream.” He thanked AAUC for reaching out and asking the simple question: what can we do to help your community? “Coming together is so important,” Sin said. “I’m just one person. But how do I build new leadership. That is the challenge I see.”

In closing, Fong reinforced a broader argument that America has never fully accounted for the human cost of its foreign wars. A slide he shared at the close of the session catalogued dozens of military interventions over the past 60 years, from the Dominican Republic in 1965 to the current conflict in Iran. He called it, with sarcasm, “the U.S. military resume.” “We don’t really factor in the cost of refugee displacement when we enter these wars,” he said. “Each of these has produced displaced populations, people with varied stories and circumstances, coming to America.”

April 27, 2026

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Subject: Formal Protest of the Rhetoric Harmful to Asian American Communities and Our National Interests

Dear Sir/Madam –

We, the Asian American Unity Coalition (AAUC), representing Indian American, Chinese American, and broader Asian American communities, issue this formal letter of protest in response to the rhetoric endorsed by the White House on April 23, 2026.

The promotion of Michael Savage’s remarks, which characterize India as a “hellhole” and suggest that legal and birthright citizenship for Asian Americans are tools of subversion, represent more than a political disagreement. It is a direct assault on the dignity of millions of citizens and a strategic blunder that undermines the economic and national security of the United States.

The Economic Reality vs. The Rhetoric of Exclusion

The claim that Indian and Chinese immigrants lack English proficiency or engage in exclusionary hiring practices is demonstrably false. Indian Americans have the highest median household income of any ethnic group in the U.S. (approximately $150,000), and Chinese Americans contribute significantly to a STEM workforce that drives American innovation. The technologies created by these groups, especially in the Silicon Valley, are keeping our country on the top of the technology ladder. To disparage the very demographic that forms the backbone of the U.S. technology sector at a time when global competition for talent is at its peak is an act of economic self-sabotage.

The “Great Talent Flip” and National Security

By signaling that legal residency and birthright citizenship are no longer secure, this administration is accelerating “The Great Talent Flip.” When the “Individual Survival Rubric” for highly skilled professionals includes facing state-sanctioned xenophobia, the United States ceases to be the world’s premier destination for innovation. This hostility serves as a recruitment tool for our competitors, driving top-tier talent toward China and other emerging powers, and ensuring that the next generation of breakthroughs happens outside our borders.

The Middle Power Paradox and Diplomatic Erosion

The description of India, a critical strategic partner, as a “hellhole” creates an untenable “Middle Power Paradox.” The administration cannot expect to tether middle powers to U.S. interests while simultaneously insulting their sovereignty and their diaspora. Such rhetoric increases the “Cost of Strategic Alignment” for our allies, forcing them to seek sovereignty through non-alignment or regional blocs, thereby hastening a “Hegemonic Sunset” where American influence is diminished.

The Undermining of the American “Source Code”

The attack on birthright citizenship is an attack on the “Civilizational Source Code” of the United States. For over a century, the guarantee of citizenship by birth has been the bedrock of American social cohesion. To suggest that the children of immigrants are “anchor babies” creates a climate of “Tactical Chaos,” where legal residents are left to wonder if the rules of the game will be rewritten overnight. This does not “Restore the Rule of Law.” It replaces it with ideological exclusion.

Conclusion

We demand an immediate retraction of these endorsements and a formal apology to the Indian and Chinese American communities. We also call upon the mainstream media to rigorously fact-check these claims and highlight the catastrophic long-term risks of driving global talent away from our shores.

The “2026 Economic Shift” should be defined by American excellence and strategic coherence, not by tactical chaos and the alienation of our most productive citizens. We are not “guests” in this country, we are the infrastructure of its future.

Sincerely,

Yen Marshall
President
Asian American Unity Coalition

Dr. SK Lo
Board Chair
Asian American Unity Coalition

Moderated by John C. Yang, President and Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the webinar convened experts from five major civil rights organizations to examine voter purges, polling place intimidation, landmark Supreme Court cases, and the erosion of the federal Voting Rights Act.

Yang opened by saying, “At its core, this is about whether all of us as eligible voters, regardless of who they are and regardless of where they live, have a fair and equal opportunity to have their voices heard.” For the Asian American community specifically, the threat is concrete: roughly two in five Asian American voters rely on mail and early voting options now under legal attack, and face language barriers that make polling place assistance an essential lifeline.

Voter Purges and the Attack on the Rolls

Taifa Smith Butler, President of Demos, organized systemic barriers into three categories she called “roles, polls, and trolls.” On voter rolls, she described aggressive and inconsistently applied purges disproportionately harming voters of color, young people, and low-income voters. Georgia conducted one of the largest voter purges in its history last August, removing nearly half a million people due to inactivity. Alabama and Florida have similarly purged voters dangerously close to election cycles.

Butler flagged an emerging federal threat: the government’s efforts to obtain unredacted voter registration files from states to build a national database. “This, I believe, is another effort that we have to watch, that the federal government might try to use the rolls to actually do mass purges,” she warned, while crediting states like California for successfully pushing back in court.

Intimidation at the Polls and the Right to an Assistor

Tom Saenz, President and General Counsel of MALDEF, addressed the threat of voter intimidation, including the possibility of federal agents being deployed near polling places. “We cannot dismiss the possibility that even the federal government through executive order or otherwise may engage in activities including deploying immigration agents or other federal agents at or near polling places,” he said. Private individuals, potentially encouraged by White House rhetoric, could also appear at polling sites in security uniforms or openly carrying firearms.

Saenz also defended Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act, which guarantees every voter not literate in English the right to bring an assistor of their choice to the polls, pushing back on any suggestion that the administration’s executive order making English the official language could override it. “Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act, as duly enacted congressional legislation, cannot be overruled by an executive order of any kind from the president,” he said flatly.

His organization’s own case, Arkansas United, illustrates how thoroughly that right is being dismantled. MALDEF challenged an Arkansas law limiting any single assistor to helping no more than six voters. The Eighth Circuit rejected every legal vehicle available to enforce Section 208. “Every avenue is foreclosed to guarantee and protect the rights granted under the Voting Rights Act,” Saenz said. The case now awaits Supreme Court review.

The Supreme Court and the Future of the VRA

Adriel Cepeda Derieux, Deputy Director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, delivered the briefing’s most urgent news: the Supreme Court may be days away from issuing one of the most consequential voting rights rulings since the civil rights era in Louisiana v. Callais. At the heart of the case is whether remedying racial discrimination under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is itself discriminatory.

“If the court rules against voters, it would be a profound setback for multi-racial democracy. It could roll back protections and strip voters of one of their core and meaningful legal defenses for over 60 years,” Cepeda Derieux said. She urged voters not to be deterred regardless of the outcome, noting that electoral maps for November have largely already been set.

On ICE presence at polling places, a fear growing in AAPI and immigrant communities, she drew a firm legal line. “Any deployment of ICE or any law enforcement officers for the purpose of intimidating voters or interfering with the right to vote would be unlawful,” she said, encouraging voters to remain calm and know their rights.

Native Voters and the Threat to Mail Ballots

Jacqueline De León, Senior Staff Attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, described two cases with potentially devastating consequences for Native voters. In Turtle Mountain v. Howe, the Eighth Circuit ruled that private plaintiffs have no right of action under the Voting Rights Act, meaning individuals harmed by racial discrimination could not bring their own cases. “If affirmed, Turtle Mountain would effectively leave the Voting Rights Act an empty shell,” DeLeon said.

A companion case, Watson v. Republican National Committee, threatens the ability to count mail ballots received after Election Day in over a dozen states. For Native voters in remote Alaskan villages, the consequences could be total disenfranchisement. “In some villages, the number of ballots that arrived after election day was over 50%,” DeLeon said. She also dissected the SAVE Act’s nominal inclusion of tribal IDs as a “disingenuous attempt at inclusion when really it’s about exclusion” — tribal IDs lack the place of birth and expiration date the law requires. For remote Native voters, presenting documents in person could require a thousand-mile journey. “Native voters that are disproportionately impoverished, that lack access to roadworthy vehicles, are just certainly not going to be able to make this trip,” she said.

State Voting Rights Acts: Going on Offense

Lordes Rousado, President and General Counsel of Latino Justice PRLDEF, offered the most forward-looking perspective, describing a push to pass state-level voting rights acts as an offensive strategy against federal erosion. Her organization collaborated with the Legal Defense Fund, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), the Campaign Legal Center, and the Harvard Election Law Clinic to develop model state voting rights legislation released in January.

“The states can, and I would say, must be laboratories for democracy and create rights that go beyond the federal minimums,” Rousado said. The model act includes pre-clearance provisions, protections against vote dilution and wrongful purges, translated materials for language minority voters, and remedies for voters facing intimidation. Rousado pointed to a recent New York victory as proof of concept, where a successful challenge under the state VRA resulted in redrawn maps that restored the voting power of Black, Latino, and Asian voters in Nassau County. Voting rights laws are now on the books in at least eight states, with active legislation in nine others.

The SAVE Act and the Myth of Voter Fraud

The SAVE Act, requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register or vote, drew sustained criticism as a solution in search of a problem. Rousado offered a personal example: her 83-year-old Cuban American mother, a citizen and dedicated voter since the 1960s, currently lacks a valid passport and cannot locate her citizenship papers. “My mother could be disenfranchised by this act when she’s been a citizen and voting since the 1960s,” she said. More than 21 million Americans currently lack ready access to a passport or birth certificate.

Saenz went further, calling the voter fraud narrative driving such legislation a “canard.” “Voter fraud is non-existent in this country and has been for 50 years,” he said, pointing to the first Trump administration’s quietly disbanded voter fraud commission that “could not prove anything.” He reframed the real problem: “The fact is the problem in this country is not over-participation of ineligible folks in voting. It is under-participation of fully eligible voters.”

A Message to Reporters

Closing the briefing, panelists converged on a unified message to journalists on the call: see the full scope of what is happening and name it accurately. Butler urged the media to resist false election security narratives. Cepeda Derieux asked reporters to connect the dots. “This is a broad, very far-reaching, multifront effort to shrink who can participate in our democracy,” she said. DeLeon kept the focus on race. “The shrinking of the electorate is often along racial lines, and I think too often we lose that narrative,” she said. Rousado called for human storytelling: “Uplift the individual stories of people who encounter difficulties in voting. The more those stories are told, the more people will understand that it is a big deal.”

Yang offered a closing summary that distilled the morning’s message: “Restrictions to voting is literally anti-democratic. The purpose of a democracy is to be able to vote, and anytime you are disallowing voting on the basis of imagined problems, that should be called out.”

Host Michael German, a former FBI agent turned civil liberties advocate explained that since 2015, APA Justice has been “raising public attention and organizing opposition to biased national security and law enforcement programs that unfairly target people based on race, ethnicity, and national origin rather than individualized evidence of wrongdoing.”

German traced the organization’s work from its 2020 webinar series on the China Initiative, a Justice Department program that brought false espionage allegations against prominent Asian American scientists, through its 2024 examination of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He reminded attendees that the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program began in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and in direct violation of the FISA law, and that rather than being curtailed, it has been repeatedly expanded. He said, “Today, we’re seeing masked ICE agents engaging in abusive tactics against undocumented immigrants, as well as permanent residents, refugees, and asylum seekers, and even U.S. citizens.” He reminded attendees that ICE and border patrol agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti for monitoring and documenting their activities, and that agents had dragged Hmong American Chong Lee Tao from his home handcuffed in his underwear.

St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her, born in the mountains of Laos and resettled in the United States as a refugee at age three, opened with a ground-level account of what her city endured, making clear it predated the national conversation. “What we saw here happening in Minnesota was happening to our AAPI community long before everyone else. The rest of the country, the world started seeing what was happening here,” she said. As a state legislator, she had convened meetings with ICE as early as the prior April, receiving almost no information about where operations were occurring or who was being targeted. “I remember distinctly asking them, are you sure you’re only going after people with criminal records? Because we’re hearing from our community that you’re just targeting anybody now.” By summer, community members with removal orders were refusing to attend their check-ins. “We had already heard that too many people were getting taken,” she said.

Her described a sophisticated community response that included constitutional observer training, growing from 30 or 40 attendees to hundreds per session, as well as Signal-based underground alert networks and volunteers who tracked ICE vehicle license plates from the Whipple Federal Building and maintained a database to warn neighborhoods in real time. Businesses saw revenues drop 60 to 70 percent. Her administration worked to quantify the full cost of what she called “the ICE occupation,” from school shutdowns and remote learning to patients too frightened to seek medical care. “What is the health impact of that,” she asked, “and the cost to the healthcare system when people are waiting until they’re really sick in order to go see a doctor because they’re afraid to leave?” The data was marshaled to support a proposed $40 million state relief package currently before the Minnesota legislature. “The aftermath,” she said, “is really rebuilding and supporting our communities.”

Saira Hussain, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, laid out the surveillance architecture enabling ICE enforcement. She highlighted Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, set to expire April 20th, which allows warrantless sweeping of Americans’ communications when they contact people abroad. She flagged the Trump administration’s “catch and revoke” program, a social media surveillance initiative targeting what she called “disfavored speech,” ranging from pro-Palestinian expression to anything deemed “anti-American.” She also described the breakdown of federal data silos, including IRS, DMV, and utility records now accessible to ICE. “When you break down these data silos, it means that ICE is able to build up profiles of people and identify targets for deportation,” she warned. On the question of protecting oneself at the border, Hussain was direct: border agents can demand your device passcode, you can refuse, and as a U.S. citizen you must still be admitted, though your device can be detained for weeks or months. She directed attendees to Surveillance Self-Defense, ssd.eff.org, for practical self-protection guidance and urged people to disable biometric phone locks before crossing. “Privacy,” she said, “is a team sport.”

Temple University physicist Xiaoxing Xi offered the webinar’s most searing personal testimony, a detailed account of what government overreach looks like when it lands on an innocent man’s doorstep. In May 2015, approximately a dozen armed FBI agents raided his home, rounded up his wife and daughters at gunpoint, and took Xi away in handcuffs. The charge: wire fraud, based on four emails he had sent to scientific colleagues in China as part of university-encouraged international research collaboration. “They charged me for sharing U.S. company technology with China, with my collaborators, which was not true,” he said. “All four emails had nothing to do with that technology at all.” The agents, Xi said, simply did not understand the science, and did not consult experts before making the arrest. “They should have done their due diligence and figured out whether they really had evidence to charge me for the crime.”

The government dropped its case four months later. But the damage, personal, professional, psychological, was permanent. “That changed my life and the life of my family forever,” Xi said. “When you are charged by the federal government for crimes — I’ve seen many cases after mine — people cannot think, they cannot eat, they cannot sleep. It’s just a huge pressure.” He described the disorienting experience of facing the full weight of federal prosecution while knowing he was innocent. “When you look at the indictment, it says very clearly — the United States of America versus — such a pressure on you.” Even exoneration brought no full relief. “Even today we are afraid that they are still listening to all my phone calls and looking at all my emails,” he said. “They told us that FISA was used in my case. They had all my emails. They tapped our phone and listened to conversations between myself and my family.”

Xi was emphatic that his case is not an anomaly. Because AAPI communities maintain connections to family and colleagues abroad, they are disproportionately exposed to Section 702 surveillance. “We came from China. We became naturalized citizens. We have families and friends back where we came from. And so, we are disproportionately targeted just for this.” He described the China Initiative’s broader toll: professors investigated by the NIH, researchers who resigned or returned to China, and one Northwestern University professor who took her own life under the pressure of federal scrutiny. His own lawsuit against the government, which was filed with ACLU representation, dismissed at the district level, and won on appeal, reflects how long the struggle for accountability can take. “What happened to me,” Xi said, “could happen to anybody who has done nothing wrong.”

John Yang, Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, connected the current moment to a long pattern of using national security as a pretext to scapegoat AAPI communities. “No matter how long we have been in this country, we are perceived as foreigners,” he said. “You couple that with this notion of so-called national security — and historically that has always caused the Asian American community to be scapegoated.” He drew a direct line from Japanese American incarceration during World War II to the post-9/11 racial profiling of Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian Americans, to the China Initiative and today’s ICE crackdown. A recent poll, he noted, found that about 56 percent of Asian Americans oppose the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, and that four times as many Asian Americans have been arrested under the current administration compared to the Biden administration. “Behind each of these statistics,” he said, “are individual instances that we also have to care about and lift up.”

Yang urged a three-part framework for community response: advocate, educate, and empower. He called on community members to contact their congressional representatives about Section 702, warning against the assumption that individual voices don’t matter. “What they do in congressional offices is — when they get a call from a constituent, they have a little tally sheet,” he said. “That does make a difference.” He closed with a call to vote in the upcoming midterms and to hold elected officials accountable on the specific issues shaping AAPI lives. “This is about privacy,” he said. “This is about individual liberty. And those are issues that resonate across the board.”

The webinar was co-sponsored by Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the Asian American Scholars Forum, and the Committee of 100.

The honor acknowledges residents who risked their lives to protect their neighbors and immigrant community members from an unprecedented federal law enforcement operation, peacefully defending the human rights and values that serve as the foundation of constitutional democracy.

Beginning in 2025, a sharp escalation in federal immigration enforcement swept cities across the country, disrupting workplaces and neighborhoods and stoking fear among immigrant families. In the Twin Cities, the surge was especially intense: more than 3,000 federal agents from ICE and Border Patrol were deployed to the metro area, in an operation the Department of Homeland Security described as the largest federal immigration enforcement action in U.S. history.

Tens of thousands of residents took to the streets to peacefully protest federal overreach and threats to immigrant families and constitutional protections. Others documented enforcement activity and alerted neighbors to federal agents’ presence, including two community members, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were killed by enforcement agents.

Faith leaders organized demonstrations, community groups built rapid-response networks, labor leaders and small businesses defended workers, and volunteers provided critical support and resources. Across religious, racial, and political lines, a broad coalition of residents of the Twin Cities and surrounding suburbs united in peaceful resistance despite violent confrontation and real personal risk, defending their neighbors’ rights and strengthening what the foundation called the national movement to protect American democracy.

The JFK Library Foundation described the community’s response as a defining act of civic courage. “The people of the Twin Cities responded with extraordinary courage and resolve,” the foundation said in its announcement.

Caroline Kennedy and her son Jack Schlossberg issued a joint statement saying, “Without public servants of integrity committed to maintaining the highest standards of institutional excellence and independence, and citizens willing to put their lives on the line to hold America to its promises, our democracy can’t survive.”

U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) praised the recognition. “This winter, Minnesotans showed the world what courage looks like,” she said. “Our state was the center of America’s heartbreak, but we were also the center of America’s hope. This award is a recognition not just of how our state persevered, but of how Minnesotans led the way in defending the freedoms that define our democracy and the rule of law.”

The deaths of Good and Pretti galvanized thousands of demonstrators to take to the streets in frigid temperatures to demand that ICE and related agencies stand down. The protests drew national attention, with Bruce Springsteen and British folk rocker Billy Bragg each releasing songs in solidarity with the Twin Cities community.

The Twin Cities’ award was announced alongside recognition for Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who is being honored for protecting the independence of the Federal Reserve despite political pressure and personal attacks from the highest levels of government.

Caroline Kennedy and Schlossberg will present the awards via livestream on May 31, 2026, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.

The original program had been designed to celebrate AANHPI contributors to the U.S., a fitting theme as the nation approaches its 250th anniversary. But the U.S. and Israeli military strikes on Iran changed that. AAUC Executive Director Ted Fong acknowledged, “We would have been remiss if we conducted this without even talking about the war, because the war sets the stage for a lot of issues, not just globally, but locally.”

Before diving in, Fong asked participants to describe the current global climate in one or two words. The responses came quickly, and they were unsparing: dystopian, dysfunctional, chaotic, divisive, disappointment, uncertain, and crazy times.

Why Are We at War?

Jack Hanna, a retired attorney, AAUC’s vice president, and a man of Arab American heritage, gave the sharpest legal framing to the war discussion. Drawing directly on the Constitution, he noted that the power to declare war rests with Congress, and that this foundational check had once again been bypassed. “This is an erosion of what the intent of the founders of our country established,” Hanna said, “in order to prevent ambitious, improper military actions against foreign countries, which is what I think we have exactly here today.”

He went further, questioning not just the legality of the war but its strategic coherence. “The reasons for the war are changing moment by moment,” he said. “Is it because of ballistic missiles? Is it because of suppression of civil rights of the Iranian people? Does it have to do with nuclear materials? Is it regime change? This is a reflection of a government that’s making it up on the spur of the moment.”

Voices from the Community

The discussion that followed was wide-ranging and deeply personal.

Benny Lee, a veteran of local politics, reflected on the collapse of the political center and what it has cost the country. “When I got into politics, there was always 20 percent on the left, 20 percent on the right, and 60 percent in the middle, and that has eroded significantly,” he said. Where that middle once held, he argued, the country has drifted toward the extremes, making the kind of deliberate, consensus-driven governance the founders envisioned increasingly difficult to achieve. “We’ve taken three steps forward and four steps back.” Lee returned, as Hanna had, to the Constitution, “It begins with ‘We the People,’ and it’s no longer about the people.”

Sing Lo, who has lived in the United States for 60 years, was succinct and cutting: “I’m not too sure it’s the country that I knew when I was here 60 years ago.”

Kim Sin, a leader in the Cambodian community in Rochester, Minnesota, said the war in Iran has already driven up gas prices and everyday costs, hitting Asian American seniors on fixed incomes especially hard. The federal freeze on Medicare and Medicaid programs has cut off services for the elderly and people with disabilities, with no clear end in sight. “There’s money for war,” he said, “but there’s no money for the people living in the U.S.” Kim also explained why Cambodian and Laotian Americans are often less vocal about advocating for themselves. “In Cambodia, it was the Khmer Rouge. Anything you say or anything you do, they’ll execute you. So, they learned to be silent.” That silence, he made clear, is a generational wound and one the community is now working to overcome.

Fong connected with Sin’s comments by saying he had just returned from the Southeast Asian Freedom Network’s Uniti Fest in Sacramento, held on the 50th anniversary of the end of the War in Southeast Asia. “Most of the attendees were young Hmong, Cambodian, and Laotians who were still deal with their families’ escape from these countries. “The thing that you heard was, ‘We escaped the very thing that’s happening to us now. Our families came to a country with a dream that seems to be forsaken.’”

Carla Mays, from #SmartCohort based in California, drew a sharp contrast between U.S. policy priorities and those of Asian nations like Singapore, Japan, and China. “We’re so distracted by our old way of doing things,” she said. “In Asia, there’s always talk about healthcare, housing, transport — investments that keep people alive. Here, those things aren’t important.” She warned that the current administration’s budget priorities would shred an already thin safety net.

Marsha Golangco, who immigrated from Hong Kong decades ago, reflected on a sense of national fragmentation. “Each of us has our freedoms including, our own opinions. But as a people, we are not together,” she said. “I call it a decline of the American empire. It’s not well.”

Hedy Tripp, joining from St. Cloud, Minnesota, offered a reminder of Iran’s ancient civilization and its deep global ties. “Persia is an ancient, ancient civilization,” she said. “Persians and Mediterranean, African communities have all been trading and connecting themselves all over the world, including Asia. We have ties to Iran, globally as well.” She also raised a pointed question: how do we shift America’s narrative to treat people, not weapons systems, as the nation’s primary asset?

Fong added his own blunt perspective, “I just don’t see, given our historical record, how we can bomb other countries into democracy. We failed to do that in Vietnam, Afghanistan and in many other places.”

Champions of Democracy, The AANHPI Legacy

With the weight of the present firmly established, the town hall pivoted to its core program: a review of AANHPI figures who have upheld democracy, rule of law, and governance, from the 19th century to today.

Jack Hanna led with Wong Kim Ark, the San Francisco-born man whose late 19th-century legal battle established the constitutional right to birthright citizenship. The case is newly urgent. President Trump’s executive order challenging birthright citizenship is set for Supreme Court argument on April 1st, with a decision expected by late June. “Tens of millions of immigrants since then have birthright citizenship for their children who were born here,” Hanna noted, adding that despite winning his case, Wong Kim Ark was continuously harassed, and his son was deported years later. “The remnants of prejudice continued.”

Hanna then profiled Fred Korematsu, who in 1942 refused to comply with the executive order incarcerating 120,000 Japanese Americans, was arrested, and fought his case all the way to the Supreme Court and lost, in one of the worst decisions in American judicial history. Decades later, newly discovered military records proved the government had concealed evidence that Japanese Americans posed no security threat. In the early 1980s, Korematsu reopened his case, won, and successfully advocated for reparations. “Now we see that detention camps are already being reconstructed,” Hanna observed. “Fred Korematsu’s legacy is impacting us today.”

Hanna also honored Corky Lee, the self-taught New York photographer who for 50 years documented Asian American communities without profit or fanfare, often borrowing cameras to get the job done. “We must document what’s happening,” Hanna said. “We have to show and expose when wrong and improper actions are being committed. His work is a pathway to protecting ourselves and our communities going into the future.”

Fong spotlighted Kaohly Her, the newly inaugurated mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota, born in a bamboo hut in Laos, raised as part of the Hmong diaspora created by U.S. military operations, and thrust into the national spotlight just three days after taking office when the first ICE-related killing occurred in her city. As she took to the national stage, her response was swift and steady. She passed ordinances prohibiting ICE activity on city property and required masked law enforcement to identify themselves. “Her family described her as a protector, tough, and one who never took crap from anybody.” In person, however, people report that she is cordial. “Her temperament is perfect for a job like that,” Fong said. “She is a good example to all immigrants that they can have a place at the table.”

Hanna reserved some of his deepest admiration for civil rights activist and author Helen Zia, who spoke at the AAUC’s national summit last summer and whose decades of advocacy span virtually every major social justice movement of the modern era. Her activism began at Princeton in the late 1960s, where she was among the first women admitted, connecting immediately with Black and Latino communities and opposing the Vietnam War. In the early 1980s she organized the country around the unlawful killing of autoworker Vincent Chin. He said, “Her coalition-building across communities of color established a model of solidarity that continues to define how AANHPI communities respond to injustice, discrimination, and hate.”

The program also covered Texas State Representative Gene Wu, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, Congressman Ted Lieu, John C. Yang of AAJC, and Karthick Ramakrishnan of AAPI Data.

SK Lo’s Closing Word

AAUC Board Chair Dr. SK Lo was given the final word.

“The town hall reminds us of a very simple but powerful truth,” Lo said. “Asian Americans have always played a very essential role in safeguarding the nation and strengthening democracy, especially in times of conflict and uncertainty. Our community has served and led and sacrificed, even when our contributions are overlooked and our loyalty is questioned.”
She called the current moment “a redefining time,” and issued a direct call to action: “We should not be a silent minority. We are a vibrant, engaged, and essential part of America’s story. Our voice matters more than ever. Together, we need to lead, to serve, and to stand for the values that define this country.”

The AAUC will hold its next town hall on April 16, 2026. AAUC’s 2026 Unity Summit, “From Crisis to Coalition: Lessons from the Front Lines,” is scheduled for June 27–28 in Minneapolis, with community visits to Hmong, Latino, and Somali leaders on day one, and presentations and networking at the University of Minnesota Alumni Center on day two. Visit the event page.

The meeting was chaired and moderated by Dr. Thomas Abraham, Chairman of GOPIO USA and a Member of the Board of Governors of Asian American Unity Coalition (AAUC), who presented an overview of the challenges facing the community and outlined potential strategic responses. Prakash Shah, President of GOPIO International, noted that recent hostility and anti-Indian rhetoric appear to be driven by a small fringe group from the extreme right and do not reflect mainstream American values.

Participants reaffirmed that the Indian American community is peaceful, law-abiding, and socially constructive, with no history of organized violence or social aggression. While isolated misunderstandings may occur—as they do in broader society—the community’s overall record reflects overwhelmingly positive contributions to American civic life, economic growth, and social cohesion.

Strategic and Measured Response – Participants observed that recent increases in online hostility and bias incidents are driven less by crime or lack of integration and more by economic anxiety, the politicization of skilled immigration, racial profiling, and the amplification of stereotypes through digital platforms.

Strengthening Civic Engagement and Integration – A key theme of the meeting was reinforcing assimilation alongside cultural pride. Leaders emphasized the importance of full participation in civic institutions, local communities, and democratic processes. The group discussed expanding voter engagement, civic education, youth leadership development, and bipartisan outreach initiatives to promote long-term inclusion and meaningful civic participation. Community members were also encouraged to actively engage in local activities and support charitable and interfaith initiatives.

Action Plan – GOPIO has established a Task Force to document hate campaigns and civil rights violations affecting the community. The Task Force members are Rajender Dichpally (Chair), Nagaraj Subbarao Sarma, Pankaj Sharma, Miraj Joshi and Jayashri Chintalapudi. GOPIO has requested community members to report any hate campaign against Indian American community or any civil rights violation to GOPIO’s exclusive email address at watch@gopio.net or call 203-329-8010.

Yen Marshall, President of AAUC, opened the gathering by framing the moment as one that demands understanding before action. “We cannot resist what we do not understand,” she said, setting the tone for a wide-ranging conversation that moved from on-the-ground stories of neighborly courage to a deeper analysis of authoritarian tactics being employed nationwide.

“We are not alone”

Speaking from Minneapolis, the epicenter of the crisis, AAUC founding president and board chair SK Lo described both the trauma and the solidarity she had witnessed firsthand. She spoke with urgency about how fear has settled into the daily lives of Minnesota’s immigrant communities, even as ICE activity has slowed. “The fear they created simply hasn’t gone away,” Lo said. “It still lingers in our homes, our workplaces, and the decisions we want to make about how to stay safe.”

Lo had joined Minnesota Indivisible, participating in a rally organized in January despite bitter cold weather, and described a wave of creative, peaceful resistance across the Twin Cities, from an SOS sign lit with lanterns on what was once Lake Calhoun, to “ICE Out” signs placed near the airport so arriving passengers could see them, to the formation of a singing resistance group whose voices, Lo said, remind the community that “music can carry the truth other than fear.”

Following the first AAUC town hall, Lo and others helped distribute a community guide on constitutional rights and personal safety. Her message was ultimately one of collective strength. “If we stand together and share our knowledge and remind each other of our rights and our dignity, then I think we would have a way of overcoming the challenges facing us,” she said.

“Minnesotans have really impressed me”

Christina Morrison, editor-in-chief of Minnesota Chinese World and founder of the Association of Sino-American Neocultural Exchange, brought the perspective of a journalist who covered the ICE incursion across six or seven reports while also living through it as a community member. What she witnessed, she said, was something she had never seen in her 25 years in Minnesota.

“I saw extraordinary efforts of neighborly support by Minnesotans,” Morrison said, describing neighbors buying groceries for people too afraid to leave their homes, co-workers covering shifts for those who feared coming in, employers supporting struggling small businesses, and residents passing out whistles and joining secret chat groups to document and track ICE activity.

She shared a personal account from January 15th, when two Chinese restaurant workers were detained and quickly transferred to Texas. Within hours, community members formed a WeChat group called “Community Safety,” with members contacting the ACLU in Texas, reaching out to the Chinese Consulate General in Chicago, and working through every available channel to secure the men’s release. Though their efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, Morrison said the story illustrates the speed and determination of community response.

“What happened in Minnesota has really encouraged people in other places,” she said, noting that protesters in Boston were heard chanting, “We are not cold, we are not afraid. Minneapolis has taught us to be brave.” She closed by reminding attendees of the constitutional importance of state authority: “The states in the U.S. have considerable autonomy and power at the state level. Not to allow federal overreach in areas where the states have the final control by design.”

“We can decide the kind of America we want to be”

Professor Yolanda Moses, a cultural anthropologist at UC Riverside, offered historical context, placing the current crisis within a long arc of American struggles over identity, belonging, and power. From the nation’s founding, she argued, the central question has always been the same: whose America is this?

“This country has only been dealing with issues of true integration for less than 100 years,” she said, tracing the line from the abolition of slavery through the Civil Rights Act of 1965 to today. She urged everyone to read Project 2025, describing it as a blueprint for those who “want to purge the country from unwanted people.”

Moses drew a direct line from the murder of George Floyd, which she said “woke up white America” to the reality of state violence, and to the current wave of community resistance in Minnesota. She called on participants to move beyond conversation and into coordinated, nonviolent action, pointing to organizations like Indivisible as vehicles for that effort.

“We’re going to have to act in unison,” she said. “And we’re going to have to be non-violent, because that is what has worked.”

“We Want a Truth Commission to be set up”

Rajeev Singh, a board member of the Hindu American Foundation, brought a perspective shaped by both concern and a call for rigorous inquiry. He emphasized that while the Hindu American community is deeply troubled by recent events, they are pressing for something specific: accountability through investigation.

“We want a truth commission to be set up,” Singh said. “We want Minnesota, Minneapolis to be investigated impartially just like we had an inquiry after 9/11. This is just big enough. This is our future at stake.”

Singh also raised pointed questions about the nature of ICE itself, who is being recruited, and whether the agency is being shaped into a force that serves narrow political interests rather than the public. He expressed deep alarm at the killing of community members by federal agents without prior arrest or due process. “No arrests made, no rounding up. We go straight to shooting people. That is what worries me. That is what we have to get investigated.”

He acknowledged the urgency of street-level action and is hearten by what he sees in Minnesota. AAUC has the opportunity right now is bring together people with diverse backgrounds in advocacy, policy making, academia to do the same.

“We are in plain sight”

David Capelli and Carla Mays, co-founders of #SmartCohort, a California-based organization focused on equitable civic development and AAPI leadership, joined from Vancouver, British Columbia, where they had already expanded operations in anticipation of what they saw coming.

Mays, who has an Afro-Indigenous background and grew up in Wisconsin with an Afghan-born mother, connected the current moment to generations of forced displacement. For her and many of her peers, she said, safety means not just legal protection but the freedom to build a life without fear. For some, that increasingly means looking beyond U.S. borders.

“We are professionals. My mother graduated from Columbia University as a medical doctor,” she said. “It’s important that people live their truth, don’t hide their accent, be proud of who they are.”

At the same time, she spoke candidly about a generational divide in how Asian Americans and mixed-identity communities are responding to the current climate, with younger people increasingly exploring options for relocation and international mobility. “We are part of the new American diaspora,” she said. “And we need to look at what getting safe looks like in 2026.”

“So proud to be Minnesotan”

Chen Zhou, based in Minnesota, brought an intimate view of how the ICE incursion has shifted attitudes within the Chinese community, including among those who were initially supportive of stricter immigration enforcement.

“When it first started, a lot of people thought it was a good thing,” he said. “But when you see how it’s carried out, you realize this is just brutal. This is not what we signed up for.”

That recognition, he said, has become a unifying force. Local police chiefs spoke out about how ICE operations have changed. Mayors came forward. The Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans organized community gatherings at the local Asian Mall to support struggling small businesses. Lunar New Year celebrations at Burnsville Mall and other venues drew large crowds, both as cultural affirmation and as acts of economic solidarity.

“I’m so proud to be Minnesotan right now,” Zhou said. “So many people came out to demonstrations and told their immigrant neighbors, ‘If you don’t feel safe, don’t go out. We are here, we will go on.’ It’s minus 20, 30 degrees, and they’re out there.”

Zhou recently wrote an article for AAUC News, “When Fear Replaces Freedom.”

“We are trying to hold onto each other”

Rio Saito, director of the Japan America Society of Minnesota, described the unique situation facing Japanese nationals and expats living in the Twin Cities. As non-U.S. citizens, many face the prospect not of detention in Texas, but of immediate deportation, and the sense of vulnerability is compounded by the novelty of the experience.

“We are realizing that our faces can be targeted by the faceless so-called federal agents,” Saito said. “For many of us, it’s a very new concept.”

The Japan America Society has responded by hosting online and in-person networking events — spaces for community members simply to check in with one another. Saito also took comfort in the outpouring of support from outside the Asian community, particularly from white neighbors and allies standing up on their behalf. “To see how many non-Asian people out there are trying to make things better on behalf of us. That, by itself, is comforting to know that we have friends out there.”

Saito and her colleagues, she said, are holding on to each other and holding on to hope.

“We must resist!”

AAUC Vice President and retired attorney Jack Hanna presented “The Authoritarian’s Playbook,” an ongoing document he and Ted Fong have developed and published on aauc.us/playbook. It is a framework for identifying the specific tactics the Trump administration has employed to concentrate power and suppress dissent, drawn from historical patterns seen in authoritarian regimes worldwide.

The first tactic Hanna identified is the use of false pretexts to justify illegal actions. The administration invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law, to authorize mass deportations by claiming that immigrants constitute a national “invasion.” It used a fraud case involving Somali immigrants as justification for deploying ICE into Minneapolis, and declared Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. in a state of rebellion to justify sending in the National Guard. “These are false pretexts,” Hanna said flatly, “and they must be refuted.”

Closely related is the tactic of blaming and scapegoating without proof, such as accusing Renee Good of being a domestic terrorist and Alex Pretti of being a would-be assassin to justify their killings. Other examples included scapegoating migrants for housing costs and job losses, and labeling critical news organizations as “the enemy of the American people.” The goal, Hanna explained, is to demonize perceived opponents and normalize violence against them.

The administration also relies heavily on distraction, what Hanna called “flooding the zone,” releasing a relentless torrent of outrageous statements and executive actions designed to exhaust attention and prevent people from focusing on any single abuse of power. Controversies over annexing Canada or renaming the Kennedy Center serve this purpose. “They use culture wars and imagined threats to motivate the base and distract from policy failures,” he said.

Then there is simply lying, whether it’s about the 2020 election, the economy, the price of eggs, about settled wars that are worthy of earning the president the Nobel prize. Hanna noted authoritarians lie loudly, repeatedly, and without shame, because repetition makes falsehoods stick.

Weaponizing government agencies for retribution has become a defining feature of the administration’s approach to dissent. Investigations have been launched against FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. Subpoenas were issued to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Law firms representing opponents have been extorted and stripped of federal contracts. Hanna urged communities document every retaliatory action, support targeted individuals with legal defense funds, and build coalitions that present unified resistance.

Hanna noted that blatant hypocrisy does not faze the administration. Championing the Second Amendment while condemning Alex Pretti for carrying a legal firearm, pardoning a convicted the former president of Honduras, convicted drug trafficker while kidnapping Venezuela’s president on drug charges — these double standards announce that the rule of law does not matter.

In conclusion, Hanna reiterated Yen Marshall’s earlier point that “we cannot respond to things we don’t understand.” The Authoritarian’s Playbook explains the administrations tactics and offers concrete ways for the community to take action.

Moving Forward Together

Yen Marshall closed the town hall by expressing gratitude to all who spoke and reminding participants that understanding is the foundation of effective resistance. “Fear isolates,” she said, “but solidarity transforms, and that’s what AAUC stands for.”

The next AAUC Town Hall is scheduled for March 19th and will focus on AAPI contributions to U.S. progress and democratic values, timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Community members are invited to submit nominations and present their perspectives. Register here.

Introduction

Democracy doesn’t die in a single dramatic moment. It erodes through systematic tactics that normalize the abnormal, silence opposition, and concentrate power. Many AANHPI immigrants came to this country to escape the horrors of authoritarianism. And now they find themselves confronting it again.

This guide documents the specific strategies the Trump administration has to advance its agenda. From manufacturing crises to justify illegal actions, to systematically firing government watchdogs, to weaponizing federal agencies against political opponents, these tactics follow a well-worn authoritarian playbook used by would-be dictators worldwide.

But understanding the playbook is only the first step. For every authoritarian tactic, there are proven counteroffensive strategies that communities can deploy. This guide pairs the abuses with concrete actions, including legal challenges, coalition-building, rapid response networks, and sustained organizing that turn outrage into effective opposition. Resistance requires moving beyond shock to strategy, channelling individual anger to collective power.

1. Using False Pretexts to Justify Illegal Actions 

• Claiming that high levels of violent crime and drug smuggling constituted an “invasion,” invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act (AEA) to justify mass deportations without due process.
• Using a fraud case in Minnesota involving Somali immigrants as a pretext to send ICE into Minneapolis.
• Declaring that Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., were under siege and in a state of rebellion to justify federalizing and sending in the National Guard.
• Claiming that universities are hotbeds of anti-sematism to justify funding cuts
• Claiming without proof that Venezuelan boats were carrying drugs into the U.S. to justify bombing them.

2. Blaming without Proof

• Accusing Renee Good of being a “domestic terrorist” and Alex Pretti a “would-be assassin” to justify killing them.
• Accusing migrants for driving up housing costs, taking jobs from Americans, “poisoning our country,” and “eating the cats.”
• Calling any news organizations that are critical of it “fake news” and “the enemy of the American people”.
• Blaming the January 6 insurrection on Nancy Pelosi and the Capitol Police.
• Blaming non-citizens, dead people, crooked officials, and mail-in voting for voter fraud.
• Blaming Ukrainian leaders for the war with Russia.

3. Distraction

• Flooding the zone: releasing a stream of outrageous statements, social media posts, and executive actions to exhaust everyone’s attention to focus on one issue
• Creating new controversies: taking over Greenland, annexing Canada, and renaming the Kennedy Center.
• Using ad hominem attacks and nicknames for political opponents to shift focus from policy debates to personal drama.
• Gaslighting: Asserting that basic facts are untrue or fabricating events to create confusion and doubt among the public.
• Us vs. them rhetoric: using culture wars and imagined threats to motivate the base and distract from policy failures.

4. Lying

• The 2020 election was a fraud.
• We have the greatest economy in U.S. history.
• We have the biggest tax cut in U.S. history.
• “I’ve settled eight wars” in 10 months.
• The price of eggs is down 82% since March, and everything else is falling rapidly.
• “Already, I’ve secured a record-breaking $18 trillion of investment into the United States”.

Counter Offensive Strategy: A Rapid Response

A rapid response to false allegations and narratives is critically necessary and should be based upon substantiated and documented facts and possibly include legal action if appropriate. That would entail organizing a rapid-response coalition of community and lawyers when possible organizing groups to publicly debunk false claims with actual statistics and evidence. This could also include creating alternative media amplifying local voices that contradict inaccurate or false federal narratives. As an example, Minneapolis residents must counter the false aspects of the Somali fraud narrative and document every false claim systematically to establish patterns of deception and then amplify it. 

When officials falsely label activists as terrorists, mobilize independent investigations demanding bodycam footage, witness testimony, police records and unfortunately even autopsies when necessary. For anti-immigrant scapegoating, flood media with economic research showing migrants’ actual contributions to communities and economies. Create “truth squads” that follow official lies with documented corrections across all platforms. Center immigrant voices sharing their actual stories. Pressure media to stop amplifying baseless claims without immediate challenge. Organize media literacy sessions teaching propaganda recognition. Never repeat their lies even to debunk them—state truth affirmatively.

Develop organizational discipline to avoid chasing every distraction and outrage. Create focused campaigns around core issues—healthcare access, economic justice, democratic rights, climate action—and maintain and sustain them regardless of daily provocations. 

When Greenland annexation dominates coverage, redirect conversations to actual policy impacts affecting real people. Train activists and spokespeople in message discipline: acknowledge the distraction briefly if necessary, then pivot immediately back to your agenda. Support journalism that analyzes patterns rather than breathless crisis coverage of each outrageous statement. Create communication protocols distinguishing between attention-worthy developments and deliberate distractions. Organize teach-ins on propaganda techniques. Set your own agenda.

5. Firing the Watchdogs and Experts in Government

• The “Friday Night Massacre” dismissal of 17 Inspectors General without the legally required 30-day notice to Congress
• The firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez after she refused to comply with demands from HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to pre-approve vaccine recommendations without reviewing scientific evidence and to fire career scientists without cause. 
• Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics was fired in August 2025 after Trump accused her of “rigging” jobs data, following poor economic figures.

Counter Offensive Strategy: Treat and characterize every possible improper or legally questionable firing as a constitutional breach that requires judicial review and immediate mobilization. Support fired inspectors general and scientists who are whistleblowers with legal defense funds and public platforms for their testimony including congressional investigations with subpoena power, especially when legally required procedures like 30-day notices are violated. Build alternative accountability infrastructure through independent watchdog organizations to create public databases tracking all dismissed experts, including their qualifications, and the pending investigations they were conducting. Pressure Congress to strengthen inspector general independence and scientific integrity protections with real enforcement mechanisms. 

6.  Weaponizing the Government Agencies to Seek Retribution

• Investigating FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell
• Launching a criminal investigation and issuing subpoenas to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey
• Attempting, but failing, to secure federal indictments against six Democratic lawmakers who published a video urging military personnel to refuse “illegal orders”
• Directing the FCC to investigate media outlets that provide negative coverage 
• Investigating, extorting money, and terminating federal contracts of law firms representing Trump’s opponents or challenging his agenda.
  

Counter Offensive Strategy: Document every retaliatory investigation to establish clear patterns of political prosecution showing correlations between criticism and targeting. Support targeted individuals with legal defense funds, pro bono representation, and public solidarity campaigns. File ethics complaints and bar association grievances against attorneys participating in politically motivated prosecutions that violate established legal and judicial standards. Pressure Congress to exercise oversight through hearings, document requests, and appropriations restrictions on agencies conducting retaliatory investigations. Demand recusal of political appointees inappropriately attacking administration critics. Build coalitions between targeted lawmakers, governors, attorneys general, and media outlets to present unified resistance and share legal strategies. When law firms lose contracts for representing opponents, organize legal and business community pushback. Support legislative reforms strengthening prosecutorial independence and special counsel protections. Refuse to be silenced by retribution.

7. Using Fear, Intimidation, and Violence to Promote Political Agenda

• Masked ICE agents terrorized and killed Minnesotans to send a message to the rest of the country.
• Mass workplace ICE raids with military-style tactics in meatpacking plants, construction sites have created panic in immigrant communities nationwide.
• Threats against prosecutors and judges: The administration has publicly attacked state prosecutors investigating Trump associates, with supporters subsequently making death threats that forced several officials into protective custody.

Counter Offensive Strategy: Build a protective infrastructure by creating a network of  legal observers, immigration attorneys, and community defenders who can mobilize within minutes of ICE operations beginning. Establish sanctuary spaces—churches, community centers, schools—trained in constitutional rights and prepared to document abuses. Organize comprehensive know-your-rights workshops in multiple languages teaching people to refuse warrantless entry, remain silent, and contact legal help. When violence occurs like the Minnesota killings, demand independent investigations beyond the federal government. Train legal observers to document everything: badge numbers, use of force, statements made. Pressure local officials to refuse ICE cooperation. Counter fear with visible, sustained solidarity.

8. Hypocrisy

• Standing up for the 2nd Amendment while saying it was wrong for Alex Pretti to bring a legally permitted gun to a protest
• Exonerating Pete Hegseth for Signalgate while demonizing Hilary Clinton for having a private email server.
• Kidnapping the president of Venezuela for drug crimes, while pardoning the former president of Honduras, who was serving a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking.

Counter Offensive Strategy: Make every double standard impossible to ignore through relentless documentation and visual comparison. Create side-by-side charts, videos, and social media graphics showing identical behaviors receiving opposite consequences: Pretti’s legal gun versus Second Amendment rhetoric, Honduras pardon versus Venezuela kidnapping. Build media literacy campaigns teaching people to recognize double standards as domination tactics demonstrating “rules for thee but not for me.” Support journalism that systematically tracks hypocrisy rather than treating each instance as isolated. File legal challenges arguing equal protection violations when laws are improperly applied selectively based on political affiliation. Organize coalitions around principle-based positions: if private communication is a security risk, it’s a risk for everyone; if gun rights are protected, they’re protected for all. Refuse “everyone does it” framing.

9. Demonizing Liberal Culture to Dismantle Government and Funding

• Portraying universities, journalists, diversity programs, and public health agencies as ideological enemies. 
• Casting cultural institutions as corrupt elites.
• Pitting multiculturalism against nationalist priorities.

Counter Offensive Strategy: Expose the material stakes and the adverse consequences behind culture war rhetoric by connecting attacks on “woke universities” to actual research funding cuts affecting disease cures, agricultural innovation, and technological advancement benefiting everyone regardless of politics. Engage with and farmers and others how USDA research improves their yields, rural communities, how public broadcasting serves their information needs, how veterans diversity programs improve VA healthcare quality, and how small businesses consumer protection prevents fraud. Force culture warriors to explain why cancer research is “woke” or clean water standards are “elitist.” Support alternative funding while fighting for public investment and reach out and partner with unknown and unexpected allies who benefit from a functional government that protects the interests, health and public safety of the community.

10. Performative Behavior

• The Wolf Persona: Centralizing power through unpredictability and fear
• Relying on spectacle and show of force (ICE) to appeal to base instincts
• Acolytes and members of the inner circle mirror the mob boss’s combative behavior to show their loyalty.

Counter Offensive Strategy: Refuse to amplify or validate the performance—and counter their narrative with documented refutation that denies them the propaganda victory they seek. When ICE conducts televised deportations or stages border photo ops, don’t share the footage or give them free media coverage. Instead, create counter-programming showing real impacts: families separated, communities disrupted, resources wasted on theater while actual problems go unsolved. Organize alternative events demonstrating actual community values—when they stage cruelty, stage massive solidarity actions, respond by asking “What did this actually accomplish?” Build campaigns that make performative governance politically costly by relentlessly highlighting the actual failures and wasted resources that they are attempting to hide. Document officials prioritizing performance over performing the important and critical tasks they are legally charged to perform. Encourage journalism and the public at large to examine gaps between rhetoric and results by make them defend measurable outcomes, not attitude or theater.

Conclusion

Authoritarianism advances when good people feel overwhelmed, isolated, or powerless. But history proves that organized communities can resist even the most determined attacks on democracy. Every tactic in this playbook has been defeated before, when people refused to be silent, built protective networks, demanded accountability, and sustained pressure over time. 

Your resistance matters. Start locally: organize your neighbors, document abuses, support targeted communities, and refuse to normalize cruelty. Connect with established organizations doing this work. Remember that authoritarians rely on our exhaustion and division, so counter it with joy, solidarity, and stubborn persistence. Democracy survives through the daily choices of ordinary people who refuse to surrender it.