Think Immigration: Wong Kim Ark, Tuan Van Bui, and What AAPI Heritage Month Asks of Us

Until a week or two ago, I had not heard the name Tuan Van Bui. I had not heard the name Lorth Sim. Both men were Asian American immigrants who died this year at a single Indiana ICE detention facility: one Vietnamese, one Cambodian, and together two of the more than 49 people who have died in immigration custody under this administration. I am an Asian American immigration attorney in Tennessee, and I learned both of their names from a single news column written weeks after they died. That is the Asian American Pacific Island (AAPI) Heritage Month I want to talk about.

It is not the AAPI Heritage Month most of us will see this May. The proclamations will arrive. The corporate emails will go out. Many of us will share thoughtful posts about Wong Kim Ark and the Fourteenth Amendment, and we should: the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Trump v. Barbara on April 1, with a ruling expected by summer, and the constitutional protection that makes every U.S.-born child a citizen was secured in 1898 by a 21-year-old Chinese American cook returning from a trip overseas. If the Asian American legal canon means anything in 2026, it is relevant right now.

But here is what I am afraid we will skip past. The same federal immigration system that recognized Wong Kim Ark's citizenship also catalogued every Chinese laborer under the Geary Act, six years before that ruling. Asian American immigration history is not a single arc bending toward inclusion. It is a record of categorical wins followed by categorical exclusions, and it has always sorted us into "useful Asian" and "disposable Asian." The Vietnamese man and the Cambodian man who died in Indiana were on the wrong side of that sort. So were the Hmong veterans of America's secret wars in Laos who were swept up in recent Minneapolis ICE enforcement, many of whom were U.S. citizens.

This matters because there is a temptation for AAPI immigration attorneys right now to focus on the wins that benefit our practices. As an attorney who works with Korean nationals on business immigration cases, I would benefit, frankly, from the long-pending Partner with Korea Act and its proposed E-4 specialty-occupation visa. I am not opposed to it. But I am clear-eyed about what it is. A nationality-specific carve-out for highly credentialed professionals does not lift the floor for the people who need it most. It does not help the families fighting Trump v. Barbara. It does not help the Hmong veterans I just mentioned. And it does not help Tuan Van Bui or Lorth Sim. If the only immigration advocacy our community shows up for is the one that benefits our highest-credentialed countrymen, we will have reached higher on the backs of fellow immigrants whose names we never learned.

That is not the inheritance Wong Kim Ark left us. His birthright-citizenship case stood on the Fourteenth Amendment, which Black Americans and their allies won in the wake of slavery. The protection AAPI children like my daughter rely on today is borrowed from someone else's struggle. The honest version of AAPI Heritage Month asks what we are doing with that loan. So here is the call I want to make to my fellow AAPI immigration attorneys, respectfully and directly. Show up for the carve-outs that benefit our communities, but do not stop there. Show up for asylum seekers in removal proceedings. Show up for the families fighting Trump v. Barbara. Show up for H-2A workers and Hmong veterans and Latino farmworkers and the Vietnamese and Cambodian elders dying in detention. Notice when our community is being offered the role of the "good immigrant" prop in a policy debate, and refuse the role.

The 2026 Federal Asian Pacific American Council (FAPAC) theme for AAPI Heritage Month is "Power in Unity: Strengthening Communities Together." It is a good theme. The harder, fuller version of it — and the version this moment actually invites — is to raise our voices not just in celebration of what AAPI communities have built, but loudly and on the record on behalf of every immigrant community standing where we once stood. We have the bench, the bar, and the briefs. Let's use them for everyone.

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