Blog

By Catherine Ho

As the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, my childhood was filled with international time zone calculations and the familiar routine of punching in a string of numbers from a calling card to chat with our loved ones. Much rarer were the celebrations of aunts and uncles finally being able to immigrate to the United States.

My ông ngoại and ông nội, my maternal and paternal grandfathers, each qualified for resettlement to the United States through a program for Vietnamese people detained in reeducation camps in the aftermath of the war. The McCain Amendment extended the opportunity to resettle to people like my parents—the unmarried adult children of former reeducation camp prisoners. Although my parents met in Vietnam, they did not get married until they had both resettled to the United States. However, married adult children, like many of my uncles and aunts, were not able to qualify for this derivative status. American immigration law’s fixation on the nuclear family, understood as two parents and their unmarried biological children, denied the more capacious relationalities that constitute my gia đình, my family. This resulted in my parents not being able to see their brothers, sisters, nephews and nieces for decades. In person celebrations and milestones were replaced with relationships that were forced to span oceans, continents, and geopolitical boundaries.

When I was coming into my political consciousness as a young teenager, I felt uncomfortable when President Obama juxtaposed felons with families in his speech about immigration policy. My developing curiosity pondered: When has America genuinely prioritized and protected immigrants’ family ties? 

The Trump administration’s practice of separating families at the southern border therefore marked both an intensification and continuation of the ways in which immigration laws continue to divide and separate immigrants from their loved ones.

In 2020, I had the honor of witnessing Thy Chea reunite with his loved ones in the Boston Logan Airport after being deported to Cambodia. It was then that I committed myself to becoming a crimmigration (criminal and immigration) and deportation defense attorney with the hope of defending migrants’ abilities to live with and amongst their loved ones. My MA thesis explored the complexity of relying on the language of family in immigration proceedings, because such language can sometimes inadvertently invoke ideas of what a family is supposed to look like rather than the diverse ways kin networks are constituted. However, my work with AALDEF’s Immigrant Rights team this summer has revealed the necessity of highlighting immigrants’ kinship because these relations are the basis of various forms of immigration relief and are often listed as a protective consideration when prosecutors decide whether to bring a case. 

This summer, SCOTUS decided in Department of State v. Muñoz to distinguish between a citizen’s right to marriage and her right to “reside with her noncitizen spouse in the United States.” The Supreme Court thereby placed marriages between two citizens and marriages between citizens and non-citizens in different categories. In doing so, they describe the latter category as one worthy of fewer legal and procedural protections. The Supreme Court’s devaluation of immigrants’ relationships is particularly egregious given that President Biden’s recent executive order intends to “ensure that U.S. citizens with noncitizen spouses and children can keep their families together.”

American immigration law has long fixated on family ties. It is time that immigration policy makers, judges, and courts honor these commitments and allow immigrants to not only live without fear of being separated from loved ones, but also define their kin, family, and loved ones in ways that are reflective of their beautifully textured lives.