Community Defense
Case Support
VietLead provides case management to support impacted individuals in fighting their deportation orders to Southeast Asian countries, namely Cambodia and Viet Nam. This includes paperwork assistance, legal referral, ICE check-in accompaniment, etc. We mainly handle cases in Pennsylvania but also out of the state and some out of the country.
Currently, we are managing 28 total active cases. Past individual defense campaigns include #BringHieuHome, #FreeSaroun, and #BringChallyHome. Additionally, we are running pardon campaigns for four of our impacted community members and are launching more pardon campaigns in the near future.
Leadership Development
VietLead has an impacted leadership base we organize with. We are grounded in the principle that those impacted should lead this work. We seek to expand our organizing capacity by facilitating the growth of our base’s political consciousness and organizing skill sets through workshops, trainings, and active participation in actions and campaigns.
This past spring, both bases were central to our recent campaigns and other local organizing efforts. The youth base phonebanked, helped organize panels, wrote letters of support for pardons, supported creating media and toolkits, and attended a city budget hearing. The adult base has been speaking at public events, meeting with potential allied elected officials, and will further their political education this summer.
Although working within the current political legal system will never bring about the societal transformation we want to see for our communities, policy remains a critical site of struggle for protecting our impacted community members. VietLead advocates that elected officials pass policies that disinvest from the carceral and immigration systems and reinvest in solutions that keep our communities safe, whole, and thriving. Such policies include more funding for public goods and services, a stop to immigration detention, more pathways for post-conviction relief, etc.
Policy Advocacy
VietLead’s Community Defense team is active in policy advocacy campaigns that will stop the detention and deportation of Southeast Asians and all migrants. Recent advocacy efforts include uplifting the New Way Forward Act and fighting with other organizations to reclaim the Philly city budget.
SEA to See Freedom in PA Survey
As VietLead and organizations across the country have worked to end Southeast deportations, we have found that politicians and our greater community don't know about our experiences as refugees facing the injustice of the criminal justice and deportation systems. Community based research is one way we are able to combat dominant narratives about our community that invisibilize the experiences of Southeast Asians impacted by criminal deportation.
The SEA to See Freedom in PA survey is a completely anonymous 10-minute survey for formerly incarcerated Southeast Asians facing deportation in Philadelphia or Pennsylvania. The data and findings in the survey will be used in a report that will be shared to educate our community and people who have the power to stop our deportations.
Click here to learn more about the survey on our survey webpage!
See our preliminary survey report here:
Who Are We?
Our Community Defense program focuses on case support (such as legal referral, accompaniment to ICE check-ins, etc.), leadership development, and policy advocacy to end ICE detention and deportation of formerly incarcerated Southeast Asian community members in PA and NJ. We do our work in coordination with various national networks - the Southeast Asian Freedom Network, the Vietnamese Anti-Deportation Network, and the Southeast Asian Deportation Defense Network.
Why?
Our Community Defense Team is rooted in the objective to free our people from the cycle of trauma and displacement which began from U.S. Imperialism on Southeast Asian land, onto the resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees into under-resourced neighborhoods and ultimately into the carceral immigration system that has led us into the current moment of deportation within our community today. The Community Defense Team also aims to maintain and build coalitions with Black and Brown movement leaders who have led work around decarceration and defunding the police within our local networks of Philadelphia and the state of Pennsylvania. Furthermore, we also aim to foster and build an abolitionist framework to our work and to re-imagining alternatives for a Police-Free World.
An essential element of our work is also to engage our people in ways of dismantling inherent forms of cisheteropatriarchy and gender-based violence that exist in our behaviors, actions, interactions, culture, and society as Southeast Asian people. Another core intention in our work is to liberate our people from the common notion of the Model Minority Myth which blankets itself onto the Asian American diaspora and to essentially amplify our existence as a direct counter-narrative to this myth by uplifting the Southeast Asian experience of refugee resettlement and resilience.
Our Work
Coalitions/Networks
SEAFN
SEAFN is a movement family of Southeast Asian organizations dedicated to the development and mobilization of Southeast Asian communities with base-building, grassroots organizing, and movement building through gender and queer justice lenses. SEAFN is a national organization and collective of Southeast Asian grassroots groups working towards radical and transformational change led by those most impacted by systemic injustice. The leadership of SEAFN span seven grassroots organizations from across the U.S. that value the work of organizing, value internationalism, and the need to ensure that our work is led by those most impacted. Each organization, though valuing this similar framework, primarily focuses on different aspects and different issues in the community.
Other Member Organizations
ManForward (MN)
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MN8 (MN):
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F.I.G.H.T. (WA):
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Northeast Pardon Project
The Northeast Region Pardons Project is a coalition of SEA organizations in the Northeast U.S. working to bring the political campaign strategy of winning pardons as a means to halt community members’ deportations seen in other regions of the country here.
Other Member Organizations
Regional Philly/PA Immigrant Organizations:
VietLead is in coalition with regional organizations in Philadelphia and Central Pennsylvania to support each other’s local immigrant justice efforts and struggle together through joint campaigns and projects.
Join Our Accompaniment Team
Click here to sign up as a volunteer to accompany our impacted folks during their check-in with ICE. Training will be provided.
If you or someone you know has been impacted or has been issued with a final deportation order, please reach out to us at info@vietlead.org to get connected with our team and find options for relief.