On March 24, 2026, APA Justice Task Force convened a webinar titled “Mass Surveillance in the ICE Crackdown: What the Asian American and Pacific Islander Community Needs to Know,” bringing together elected officials, civil rights attorneys, and academics to examine the intersection of federal surveillance programs and immigration enforcement targeting AAPI communities, and to map concrete paths of resistance.
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.
