This is Our Fight Too
Pacific Islanders, Immigration, and the Lies We Tell Ourselves About Safety
In Los Angeles right now, people are being taken.
No sirens. No announcements. Just masked men in unmarked cars, seizing people off the street in the middle of the day. Some wear ICE badges. Others don’t. They’re grabbing people from their homes, jobs, and immigration appointments—and they’re not coming back.
And this isn’t just happening in L.A. It’s Bakersfield. San Diego. Phoenix. Atlanta.
Across the country, people are being disappeared under the language of “immigration enforcement,” while the rest of us are expected to carry on as if it’s not happening in plain sight.
And maybe you’ve scrolled past the footage. Maybe you thought, again? Maybe you’re tired. Tired of being told to care. Tired of the outrage cycle. Tired of feeling helpless in a world that demands your attention and gives you nothing back.
I understand that tired. But what’s happening isn’t distant. It’s not someone else’s crisis.
We, as Pacific Islanders, come from occupied lands and colonized histories. Many of us live here in the U.S. under fragile legal statuses—COFA migrants, mixed-status families, overstayed visas, green card renewals that take years. Some of us already know what it means to be detained. To be told we don’t belong. To be forgotten when the system decides we’re too small to count.
This fight is not new—and it’s not optional.
Not for us.
Because when people are taken without a warrant, without due process, and we’re expected to say nothing—that’s a system practicing for silence.
And if we don’t speak up now, we’re just hoping we’re not next.
Why Paperwork Doesn’t Protect Us
There’s a lie we’ve been told. Some of us even repeat it. That if you do it “the right way”—if you come legally, stay quiet, serve the country, follow the rules—you’ll be safe. But paperwork is not protection in a system built on disposability.
COFA migrants—from the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau—are legally allowed to live and work in the U.S. under international agreements. And yet, they are regularly denied healthcare access, subjected to police harassment, and deported when they become “burdens.”
American Sāmoans, born in a U.S. territory, are denied full citizenship. They pay taxes, serve in the military, and vote in local elections—but are still classified as “non-citizen nationals,” a term that sounds protective until you realize it offers none.
You can be born under the American flag and still be told you don’t belong.
The truth? Immigration law is not designed for compassion. It’s designed for control. According to ICE’s 2021 Annual Report, over 78% of interior removals had no criminal conviction at all. These weren’t violent offenders. They were workers. Caregivers. Parents. Students. People like us.
And overstaying a visa? That’s not even a crime—it’s a civil violation. But ICE treats it like a felony. Communities treat it like a stain. And people disappear because of it. So when we cling to our papers and say, “Well, I did it the right way,” we’re clinging to a system that was never designed to keep us.
Because legality is a moving target. And loopholes don’t last forever.
From Dawn Raids to Now, We’ve Seen This Before
What’s happening now in California isn’t new. It’s simply happening here. In the 1970s, Aotearoa (New Zealand) launched the infamous Dawn Raids, targeting Pacific Islanders who had migrated for work. Despite Pasifika migrants making up just one-third of overstayers, they accounted for over 86% of related arrests and prosecutions.
Police kicked in doors before sunrise. They raided homes, workplaces, churches. They dragged our families into the cold light of morning, marking them as criminals for daring to stay. Now, in 2025, we’re watching history repeat—just with a different accent and a new flag.
In Los Angeles, ICE is moving with precision. They’re not raiding in the dark anymore. They don’t need to. They’ve normalized the violence. Daylight abductions. Quiet detentions. The fear spreads without the flash. And who do they target? The people who are easiest to disappear: The poor. The brown. The ones with accents. The ones who don’t have lawyers. The ones without political power or media coverage.
You don’t have to be the primary target to be the acceptable collateral.
Pacific Islanders are not new to this feeling. We’ve been overpoliced, undercounted, and erased in both the data and the dialogue. We’ve seen what happens when we believe it can’t happen to us. We’ve lived what happens when empire grows impatient. And we’re seeing it now—again.
Just sharper. Wrapped in American paperwork. History doesn’t always shout. Sometimes, it just knocks once and never looks back.
California’s Contradictions
California loves to call itself a sanctuary. The press releases say safe haven. The billboards say protect immigrants. The politicians say we won’t let ICE in.
But the truth is messier.
ICE still picks people up from courthouses. ICE still receives DMV data. ICE still lurks outside probation offices and immigration check-ins. And even after the passage of SB 54—California’s so-called “sanctuary law”—over 40 counties still allow ICE transfers through backdoor cooperation.
Sanctuary without enforcement is performance.
If you live in L.A. or the Central Valley, you’ve seen it. If you’re Pacific Islander, you might know someone it’s happened to. And here’s where the contradiction cuts deep:
We show up for California.
We fill the military ranks. We care for the elderly. We teach, clean, drive, build, serve. But when our people are detained or deported, this state goes silent. There are no news cameras when a Tongan father is picked up. No vigils when a Samoan elder is deported after living here for decades. No rallies for the Micronesian auntie who missed a paperwork deadline.
Sanctuary is not a word. It’s a promise—measured by who it actually protects.
Pacific Islanders are rarely part of the immigrant rights conversation here. We’re too small. Too complex. Too easy to overlook. But we bleed the same. We lose the same. And we are impacted—deeply, repeatedly, invisibly. So if this state wants to call itself a sanctuary, it must mean it.
Not just for the politically visible. Not just for the data-backed. But for all of us who live here, work here, dream here.
Because a sanctuary that forgets you in silence is not a sanctuary at all.
The Quiet Exclusion of Pacific Islanders
We’re not in the photos. We’re not in the headlines. And most of the time—we’re not even in the data. Pacific Islanders are often categorized as “Other” in immigration statistics, if we’re mentioned at all. Our experiences with deportation, detention, and immigration enforcement rarely make it into policy discussions or newsrooms.
This is structural erasure. We are statistically invisible which means we are politically dispensable. And when the system doesn’t have to name you, it doesn’t have to protect you.
Between 2013–2023, ICE deported Pacific Islanders from Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia. But there is no central government database that tracks Pacific Islander deportations by nation, making community organizing and advocacy nearly impossible. We’re not too small to matter. We’re just too inconvenient to prioritize.
But let me be clear: this isn’t about blaming Asian Americans. It’s about identifying a system that benefits from our division—one that convinces us we’re alone in this. Because when we believe we’re isolated, we stop asking to be counted. And when we stop asking to be counted, they can deport us in silence.
And we are not exempt from what’s happening—just because no one’s talking about us. You can’t erase people who remember who they are. We are still here. Still fighting. Still watching.
And we refuse to be quiet just because we’ve been excluded.
What We Must Acknowledge as Settlers Too
This is the part many of us avoid. The part that doesn’t feel fair—until we realize fairness is not the point.
We are Indigenous to the Pacific, but when we live in the United States, we are settlers on stolen land. Whether we were born in Los Angeles or moved to New York as kids, we are living on land taken from Native nations through violence, treaties never honored, and displacement still ongoing. Nisenan land. Tongva land. Ohlone land. Miwok land. Kumeyaay land.
Land with names and people and ancestors that we must remember.
We were displaced by empire—and then made settlers by its borders.
This isn’t about shame. It’s about truth. And the truth is this: we live on land that was first Indigenous, then Mexican, then violently redrawn into the United States.
A Brief History We Can’t Ignore:
In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the U.S.–Mexico War and ceded half of Mexico’s territory—including California, Arizona, New Mexico, and more—to the U.S.
The U.S. promised to respect the property and rights of Mexicans who stayed. It didn’t.
Mexican families were stripped of land, voting rights, and treated as foreigners overnight.
And the land Mexico “ceded”? It wasn’t theirs to give. It belonged to Indigenous nations like the Apache, Pueblo, Comanche, and Yaqui.
Those tribes were further colonized—forced off their lands, criminalized, and erased.
The border moved. They didn’t.
So when we talk about who is “legal” and who is not, we need to remember: Some of the first people ever labeled “illegal” were the ones the border crossed. This is the history that lives beneath our feet.
We cannot demand justice for ourselves as Pasifika while ignoring the layered violences that made our lives here possible. Because we know what it means to be displaced. We know what it means to be renamed, unrecognized, forgotten.
And so we honor this truth not to carry guilt—but to carry responsibility.
To the MAGA Pacific Islanders, We Need to Talk
This part I must say because I love us too much to stay quiet.
But if you’re still wearing that red hat, reposting immigration myths, or saying, “If they’re illegal, they deserve it,”—then you’ve forgotten who you are and where you come from.
You’ve either been sorely misled or in the middle of an identity crisis—because that’s the only way it makes sense to vote and support someone who stands against everything our people have survived. Aligning with power doesn’t make you powerful. It simply makes you useful to a system that will dispose you the second you stop performing.
You think ICE isn’t coming for you because your dad served in the military, or because your papers are in order, or because your church praises American values every Sunday. But ask yourself—how many of our people have overstayed a visa?
How many came here because of U.S. colonization, only to be punished for it decades later?
You think you’re safe because you believe in the system. But the system doesn’t believe in you.
Trump has made it clear: He wants to end birthright citizenship, criminalize migration, and carry out mass deportation efforts that ignore due process.
His allies have said, out loud, that they want to redefine who counts as an American—and that definition doesn’t include people who look like us unless we’re silent, compliant, and useful. And even then—it’s conditional.
So ask yourself: What do you think makes you an exception?
Your church attendance? Your military service? Your silence? Because once they no longer need you, you’ll be disposable, too.
Being aligned with whiteness is not the same as being protected by it.
We don’t need you to change political views overnight. But we do need you to ask yourself: Whose freedoms are you protecting with your choices?
You don’t have to love every protest. You don’t have to agree with every policy. But if you can’t see the injustice in children being ripped from their parents, in people being disappeared without trials, in families being exiled—then you’ve traded your roots for the illusion of comfort.
We are not asking for pity. We are asking for solidarity. From our own. Because when our own people start echoing the language of our oppressors, it cuts deeper than any policy ever could.
Interconnected Liberation: A Call to All of Us
We are not separate from this. We never were. We come from lands the U.S. occupied, bombed, extracted from, and drafted into war. We live in communities reshaped by empire—displaced by colonization, migration, poverty, and rising seas. So when they come for our neighbors—for Mexican families, for Southeast Asian refugees, for Black migrants, for Indigenous relatives—and we do nothing?
We become the empire’s favorite kind of immigrant: Silent. Grateful. Obedient.
But that’s not who we are. Not the children of warriors. Not the descendants of navigators who crossed oceans. Not the survivors of forced removals, forced faith, forced forgetting.
Liberation was never meant to be solitary. It is meant to be shared.
This fight belongs to all of us. Because the same border that separates a family in East L.A. is the same one that will tell your aunty in American Sāmoa she doesn’t count. The same law that detains your undocumented coworker is the same one that won’t recognize your COFA status when healthcare is denied. The same system that deports the Marshallese father from Arkansas is the same one that will erase your name from the data because there aren’t “enough of you to matter.”
But we do matter.
And we don’t have to wait for our turn to be targeted to show up. We don’t have to be the headline to be part of the story. We don’t have to be deported to feel the loss. Because what’s being lost right now—in silence—is our shared humanity.
None of us are free until all of us are free. And if we’re not building that freedom together, then what are we doing?
So check on your people. Show up to that vigil. Learn the land you’re on. Demand disaggregated data. Speak. Even when it’s uncomfortable. Especially when it’s uncomfortable.
This moment asks us who we really are. And I believe—deep in my bones—that we are the kind who remember each other. Who show up. Who fight.
Not just for our own.
But for all of us.