Federal agents appear to be increasingly targeting immigrants from Laos in Oregon, including the recent arrest of a Gresham man that prompted U.S. Rep. Maxine Dexter to show up at the Portland immigration office over the weekend.
The trend here reflects a nationwide increase in arrests of people from Southeast Asia since President Donald Trump returned to office, advocates say.
In Oregon this year through March, Laotian immigrants accounted for almost 10% of 110 arrests – compared to less than 1% of 1,050 arrests in the previous six months, according to the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition’s data. The group verifies and tracks immigration arrests in the state, but its figures are likely an undercount.
Some of them have been arrested during their scheduled check-in appointments with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to the group.
It’s not clear why the Laotian man was arrested Saturday, but his detention drew not only Dexter, D-Ore., but nearly 60 people who rallied outside, said Yago Anderson, a spokesperson with Defend Migrants Alliance Oregon.
Federal authorities made Dexter wait outside the ICE building for nearly two hours before she was allowed in, but the man wasn’t there because it is believed he had been taken directly to the regional detention center in Tacoma, Anderson said.
Hunter Spence, a spokesperson for Dexter’s office, said she had no updates on the man’s case.
Supporters haven’t released the man’s name but said he had a scheduled check-in with ICE on the day after his arrest.
The man had been in the U.S. for about 30 to 40 years and has a family, Anderson said. He was doing what he was being asked to do on his immigration case, she said.
“He’s actually part of a big Laotian community here that migrated at the same time as refugees from Laos because of the war in the region and U.S. aggression that resulted in many, many refugees,” she said.
He didn’t appear in the immigration system until Tuesday morning, which confirmed he’s being held in Tacoma, Anderson said.
“It’s the story of many migrants,” she said. “They’re disappeared from their communities. We don’t know where they are. It’s really difficult to locate them. And their families are terrified.”
In the latest count from the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition, the group said half of eight arrest reports from April 9 through April 14 involved people from the Laotian community.
Across the country last year, the federal government deported nearly 400 Laotians, including Hmong people and those from other ethnic groups, said Kham Moua, national deputy director of the Southeast Asian Resource Action Center, a national civil rights organization that supports Southeast Asians.
That’s far more than the average of five to 10 deportations to Laos annually from 1998 to 2023, Moua said. In 2022, for example, federal data shows the government deported seven people to Laos.
“It sort of tracks with the administration’s overall efforts to deport immigrants,” he said. “It’s part of a pattern of this administration going after everyone.”
Moua said almost all of the Laotians deported in 2025 had a conviction or pending conviction that triggered their removal order, though a vast majority of the convictions were at least 10 years old.
Federal officers have arrested more than 2,100 people in Oregon in the Trump administration’s immigrant crackdown, with the majority of those deported being Latino men, according to ICE data published by the Data Deportation Project in late March.
The U.S. typically hasn’t deported many Southeast Asians facing immigration removal orders because their countries historically haven’t accepted the deportees.
The first Trump administration pressured Laos and other countries including Cambodia and Myanmar to take back their citizens by issuing visa sanctions.
In 2018, U.S.-Laos negotiations intensified over a formal repatriation agreement, which has yet to be signed. The U.S. was already funding a reintegration program at the time, but Laos couldn’t accept thousands of deportees at once. Laos was expected to accept 30 to 50 deportees per year.
Deportations to Laos are especially fraught because some of the immigrants face danger at home, advocates say.
That’s because the CIA recruited Hmong guerillas and others in Laos to fight the country’s communist forces alongside the U.S. in the 1960s and ‘70s while the Vietnam War was ongoing nearby.
Some of the Southeast Asian immigrants facing deportation were born in refugee camps and have no ties or family in their countries, Moua said.
“They don’t speak Lao. They have no family,” he said “…They’ve never even stepped foot in the country.”
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