Janet Nguyen, a former Republican state senator who was born in Saigon and was among a wave of Vietnam War refugees who settled in California, told POLITICO that word about the administration’s potential crackdown left people “very worried.” CALIFORNIA Trump push to deport Vietnam War refugees scalds California GOP ‘It’s not just bad social policy. It’s incredibly bad politics,’ said one Republican consultant.

Anti-Trump sentiment helped Democrats topple every Republican House member in Orange County last month in the storied California conservative stronghold.

Now, a Trump administration push to deport Vietnamese nationals is compounding the party’s problems, possibly cementing the loss of a coastal county that had long been the epicenter of Republican power in California.


As state Republicans try to chart a path out of electoral oblivion, several of them expressed incredulity that Donald Trump would follow the election thrashing by antagonizing one of the few minority groups that has consistently voted for GOP candidates.

“Trump shovels more dirt on California Republicans’ grave...” Republican Assemblyman and former leader Chad Mayes tweeted in response to reports that the administration would revive its efforts to deport Vietnamese people who arrived in America before 1995.

A substantial number of those Vietnamese people, many of them war refugees, settled in Orange County, and a shared aversion to communism forged an enduring bond with the Republican Party — much as it did with Cuban refugees from the Castro regime.

While there are signs that younger Vietnamese-Americans have veered sharply to the left of their elders, there are still more registered Republicans than Democrats among Orange County’s roughly 100,000 voters of Vietnamese descent, according to Political Data Inc., a voter data firm used by both Republicans and Democrats in California.

A wave of deportations — or even pervasive rumors linking that fear to Trump — could erode that support, state Republicans said, with lasting consequences.

“It’s not just bad social policy. It’s incredibly bad politics,” said GOP consultant Mike Madrid, who has been vociferously imploring his party to renounce Trumpism and expand its electorate. He was among a group of former California Republican Party political directors who signed a recent letter urging the rejection of “messages of hatred, division and rhetoric that divides us by race.”

Vietnamese-Americans, Madrid said, represent “the only ethnic diversity in the party to speak of.”





Administration officials have said this week that a pact between Vietnam and America does not exempt from removal Vietnamese people who arrived in the U.S. before the two countries re-established diplomatic relations.

“We have 7,000 convicted criminal aliens from Vietnam with final orders of removal — these are non-citizens who during previous administrations were arrested, convicted, and ultimately ordered removed by a federal immigration judge. It’s a priority of this administration to remove criminal aliens to their home country,” Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Katie Waldman said in a statement.

While Asian-American groups have been trending toward Democrats in recent years, Vietnamese-Americans represent something of an outlier: Karthick Ramakrishnan, a professor at the University of California, Riverside whose organization AAPI Data conducts surveys of Asian-Americans, said Vietnamese-Americans were the only Asian bloc who gave Trump a net favorable rating.

“If the Republican Party has any shot at trying to win back Orange County they have to depend on Vietnamese-American voters to get it done,” Ramakrishnan said, and while those voters remain “very much persuadable,” he said if California Republicans fail to speak out, “there will be significant damage.”

Two former Vietnamese refugees who went on to win elected office as Orange County Republicans, Assemblyman Tyler Diep and county board of supervisors chairman Andrew Do, urged Trump to reconsider.

“Requiring these thousands of refugees, who have made mistakes in the past, and their families to be condemned once again to a lifetime of poverty and recrimination is the human impact we cannot ignore,” they wrote in a letter to the White House.

Few people would understand the volatile political dynamics at play better than Janet Nguyen, a former Republican state senator who was born in Saigon and was among a wave of Vietnam War refugees who settled in California. She just lost her Orange County state Senate seat to a Democrat, Tom Umberg, who swiftly denounced the Trump administration targeting “veterans, business owners, community leaders, and most importantly, Americans.”

Whether Nguyen wins her seat back — and whether her fellow Republicans can reverse a disastrous 2018 showing — depends heavily on their ability to woo back voters who abandoned the party this cycle.

Nguyen — who held one of several Orange County state legislative seats that flipped to Democrats — told POLITICO that word about the administration’s potential crackdown had spread rapidly through the local Vietnamese community and left people “very worried.”

California Democrats have moved swiftly to condemn the Trump administration. A dozen House members signed onto a congressional letter saying people who could become eligible for deportation and their families “are Americans who are not familiar with the country they fled from.”

Altering the agreement protecting pre-1995 arrivals, they wrote, “would send thousands of Vietnamese refugees back to a country they fled years ago, tear apart thousands of families, and significantly disrupt immigrant and refugee communities in the U.S.”

Soon after Trump’s ascension, California responded by passing a law to blunt immigration enforcement by partitioning local law enforcement from federal authorities. Gov. Jerry Brown has sought to protect specific individuals of Vietnamese descent from getting swept up.

Earlier this year, the outgoing governor issued pardons to three Californians who had entered the country as refugees from Vietnam in their youths risked deportation for the crimes in question.

He’s also pardoned people with roots in Cambodia, a move sparked by a wider Trump administration crackdown on immigrants from Southeast Asia — many of whom were also driven to California after the wider fallout of the Vietnam War convulsed Laos and Cambodia as well.

Trump took notice of one wave of pardons, blasting Brown with a tweet asking “Is this really what the great people of California want?”

Linda Trinh Vo, a professor of Asian-American studies at the University of California, Irvine, noted an upsurge in organizing and interest in town halls that lay out how more stringent immigration rules could affect Orange County’s Vietnamese community.

“The broadening of who could be deported has mobilized more people in the community,” she said, and people are taking notice of newly elected Democrats excoriating the move. “That is something the Vietnamese community is going to pay attention to,” she said, “and that could have a long-term effect on their openness to the Democratic Party.”