Boun Morisath, a Laotian-born man who has lived in the US for 46 of his 50 years, who wears an Uncle Sam hoodie every Fourth of July and who loves the Seahawks, has sat in the Federal Detention Center in Tacoma for eight weeks. DHS informed his attorney on Wednesday of its intention to deport him. Last-minute legal appeals, denials, and stays are amplifying the distress his family is enduring: they’re living in a state of suspension with the full knowledge that ICE under the current Administration acts unpredictably and sometimes even against court orders. Will they send him to Laos, a country he hasn’t known since age two? Or Ecuador, or Congo, or another in the list of countries with which DHS has absurdly and cruelly made repatriation agreements?

Last week (April 26), several dozen supporters held a rally/vigil outside the NW Processing Center, for Laotians and other southeast Asians incarcerated there. Family members, leaders of immigrant advocacy groups, and State Rep. Tarra Simmons spoke with a mixture of hope and anger. A picture emerged from their remarks, a picture that disturbs our (white Americans’) understanding of our country’s abiding principles.

Let’s view it through the lens of Boun’s family. Laos was racked by war, abetted in part by the United States, until Communist forces took over in the mid-1970s. About 300,000 people--ten per cent of the entire population--fled to Thailand, including Boun’s family who lived in a Thai refugee camp for two years. A church sponsored their migration to the US, where they settled in Alaska, and ultimately, here in Kitsap County. Boun grew up, married, worked hard, and for many years owned and ran a Lao-Thai restaurant with two of his sisters. The establishment was called Sabaidee, which means “Hi” or “Doing well!”

Boun has been denied citizenship for decades because of an old arrest record stemming from a youthful indiscretion and some legal errors. When he was 17, he was in rowdy teenage company when one friend fired a pistol. Boun was the one noncitizen in the group, and because a lawyer advised him to plead guilty to be released more rapidly, the boy did so. In yet another twist of fate, he was charged as an adult. Back in the Thai refugee camp, officials had added a year to his age in his papers so that he’d receive more food. Now his age was listed as 18 instead of 17. It’s this thirty-two-year-old conviction that allows ICE to classify Boun among their “worst of the worst” and, after a lifetime of being an American, he’s on the verge of being banished from his family, his beloved community, and the only country he knows.

So this story that took shape from the speakers at Sunday’s detention center vigil is a hard one to swallow: Even while our country stands as a beacon of hope and welcome for all--this is what I learned in elementary school--it has also cynically exercised imperial ambitions: heavy-handed meddling in the welfare of other nations often for economic and political gain, often fomenting revolution and “regime change,” often with unintended drastic results. Refugee populations result. The US admits the refugees, exploits their dreams of freedom and uses their labor, and then, when it needs a scapegoat (for crime rates, economic troubles, or fearmongering for political advantage), it spits them out through detention and expulsion.

It’s a deeply embarrassing picture for many, because it violates our notions of what it means to be an American. Current US immigration policy is shot through with racism. Aside from deporting hundreds of thousands of Latinos, Africans, and Southeast Asians, the country is now accepting one single category of asylum seekers: white South Africans.

Perhaps most cynically of all, the detention centers that dot the nation are primarily run not by the government but by profit-making corporations. The GEO Group runs 65 of these facilities housing 62,000 inmates; Tacoma is among them. Governor Ferguson just announced a lawsuit filed by the state against GEO for its violations including vermin-infested food for inmates, inadequate medical care, bad water, and sexual assaults. Boun’s wife tells us that she must send texts to her husband using a special app owned by GEO which charges 35 cents for each message. On Wednesday she spent several dollars to send him a copy of a legal appeal that’s underway; GEO refused to transmit it to Boun, but kept her money! Every need of the inmates costs money; visitors are not allowed to bring food, clothes, or hygiene supplies.

What can the public do? Educate ourselves and each other: lives of thousands of our fellow human beings are being systematically destroyed by forces over which they have no say. Speak up: our collective voice does carry political power. Draw on empathy: but for the sheer accident of where and when each of our souls was born, we could be those detainees suffering injustice. And keep hope alive. Sabaidee!