FRESNO, Calif. – On a Friday night in late January, around 100 members of Fresno’s Southeast Asian community gathered in a banquet hall. They were there to discuss immigration concerns in light of aggressive and at-times-violent immigration enforcement recently carried out in Minneapolis and other cities.
“We had representatives from our Khmer community, our Lao community, our Mien community, and our Hmong community,” said May Gnia Her, who was in the front row of the gathering at The Fresno Center, a non-profit organization that serves members of Southeast Asian and other diaspora in the Fresno area.
Her is the executive director of a different non-profit: Stone Soup Fresno, which runs a preschool and other services for both kids and adults.
Her is Hmong – an indigenous ethnic group from Southeast Asia and China – and she explains that the Hmong-American story is unique.
Many Hmong people fled to the U.S. as refugees beginning in the 1970s. During the Vietnam War, countless Hmong people had risked their lives fighting alongside the U.S. in a parallel “Secret War” in neighboring Laos. As a result, tens of thousands of Hmong people died, and hundreds of thousands were no longer welcome in their communities.
“We were left with no homeland,” Her said. “We were left with no villages, no place to go back.”
Today, decades later, many who came to the U.S. as refugees have become naturalized U.S. citizens, and younger generations of Hmong-Americans who were born here were granted birthright citizenship.
Still, many say they’re afraid of being detained and even deported under a federal immigration crackdown by the second Trump administration.
Democratic Congressman Jim Costa also attended that January meeting. Some attendees told him they’re scared to leave their houses, while others said they fear family members with criminal records could be deported – even if they’ve paid their debt with prison time.
“There was a sense of: we live in America, we've done right, we follow the rules. We sacrificed 300,000 of our own people to be here, and now we have no protection,” Her said.
Costa responded to the community members to forcefully say that the tactics being used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies are wrong – and that he’s tried to fight ICE through legislation along with other Democrats in Congress. But he said those bills have largely stalled in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
He couldn’t assure the community members gathered here that they’d be safe from deportation.
“I left early because I really felt like it didn't really matter what I had to say,” Her said. “And I think that's a concern with the entire community.”
Costa later told KVPR he’s not ignoring community concerns. He said he and other Democrats are banking on regaining control of Congress in the midterms – and that on-the-ground conversations like these will help to inform future policy.
“These community forums are more than just conversations—they are essential groundwork,” he wrote in an email. “We are gathering firsthand intel from local leaders and families to understand exactly how these policies are hitting the ground. We are listening now so that when we regain control of the House, we can act decisively with policies shaped by the real-world experiences of our neighbors.”
What immigration enforcement looks like in the Valley
Meanwhile, local law enforcement agencies don’t have solid answers for the community, either.
When asked whether federal immigration officials have ramped up their presence in the Valley, representatives of the Fresno Police Department and the Fresno and Madera County sheriff’s offices couldn’t say – though they did all confirm they don’t cooperate directly with ICE.
“As a matter of policy, the Madera County Sheriff’s Office does not speculate on the presence or operations of other law enforcement agencies. ICE/CBP are not required to inform local jurisdictions, as immigration is a federal responsibility. Our focus remains on serving the residents of Madera County and ensuring public safety,” wrote Madera County Sheriff’s Office representative Kate Woertman in an email.
In the absence of information about whether the landscape is changing, some locals have taken it upon themselves to be immigration vigilantes, flooding social media with photos and videos purporting to show ICE agents in the community.
And although a few of these videos likely did capture ICE agents, many were other local law enforcement operations. For instance, the Merced County Sheriff’s Office in mid-January confirmed that a set of videos claiming to shed light on ICE operations in fact captured a massive law enforcement operation being carried out by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and a handful of other law enforcement agencies.
Community groups step up to fill in the gaps
Misinformation in times like these can backfire, said Gregorio Matiaz, an immigration program manager with the non-profit Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño that provides services to the local indigenous Mexican community.
“It's causing more uncertainty and fear amongst the community,” he said.
That fear was compounded by the fact that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services abruptly cancelled a Fresno naturalization ceremony in late January, though it was later rescheduled to a date in February.
“What I'm hearing is a lot of fear, a lot of precautions when going out,” Matiaz said.
Part of the confusion is that ICE agents are difficult to identify and commonly wear plain clothes and face masks.
But it’s also not a secret that federal agents are already in the San Joaquin Valley – though they more commonly detain people at check-ins with federal agencies, rather than in the community raids as we’ve seen unfold on national television.
“What we don't want is to cause panic in our communities,” warns Nora Zaragoza-Yañez
with the non-profit organization Faith in the Valley.
She runs the Valley Watch Network, which takes pains to confirm ICE reports then put out alerts.
“We have a team of legal observers across the eight counties where minute that we receive the information, they're activated, and they go and verify to confirm or dispel the activity,” she said.
Still, federal immigration enforcement has undoubtedly ramped up in other places – like Minneapolis – and protesting immigration enforcement agencies has also led to some unusual bedfellows.
High school students who have for weeks staged mass school walkouts in protest of ICE in the Fresno area have found themselves speaking out on the same side of an issue with others like Fresno’s Republican Mayor Jerry Dyer, who has called for keeping local control in order to maintain community trust.
Dyer, though, praised the Trump administration for things he says it has done right – like adding more security to the U.S.-Mexico border.
With few major immigration enforcement operations in the Valley, protests have largely been conducted in anticipation of what could come.
And some residents still recall a Border Patrol operation in Kern County a year ago that resulted in 78 arrests – and led to plummeting attendance at both local schools and in agricultural fields that typically employ immigrant farm laborers. That operation has been largely considered a blueprint for immigration enforcement actions that happened later in other parts of the country.
Community organizations are finding themselves in the middle of it all.
In Fresno, community advocates say they’re serving as primary sources of information as fears settle in and misinformation rises. May Gnia Her said parents and community members commonly have come to her so many times for information about local immigration enforcement that Stone Soup Fresno recently led a “Know Your Rights” workshop.
“We had a very diverse community that showed up,” she said. “And so we know that the questions are there, we know that the need is there.”
