During the holidays, I set aside some time to reflect on the impact Asian Law Caucus made last year. Some highlights for me included:

• Secured the release of Steve Li, a 20 year-old San Francisco City College student who was detained in Arizona and facing deportation to Peru. With our partners, we galvanized community support and media coverage not only for Steve, but for the DREAM Act, which if passed by Congress would provide a pathway to legalization for undocumented young people.
• Prevented the deportation of the Washington family, who were put into deportation proceedings as a result of the actions of their 13 year old son, who took 46 cents from a classmate and then returned it.
• Established new housing law clinics and prevented the eviction of dozens of low-income, limited English proficient senior tenants throughout San Francisco. 
• Monitored 200 polling sites throughout the Bay Area during the 2010 midterm elections and highlighted barriers that Asian Americans encountered in exercising their right to vote. 
• Facilitated the establishment by Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern and South Asian community members of the Coalition for a Safe San Francisco to address profiling and surveillance; hate crimes; restrictions on freedom of speech; and increasing collaboration between law enforcement on local, state and federal levels. 
• Supported Bay Area cities to opt out of Secure Communities, a federal program requiring local law enforcement to collaborate with immigration enforcement, leading to pervasive ethnic profiling and pretextual arrests. 

We achieved an organizational milestone as well, launching the Asian American Center for Advancing Justice with our affiliates Asian American Institute (Chicago), Asian American Justice Center (Washington, DC) and Asian Pacific American Legal Center (Los Angeles). Beginning with this newsletter, we will share with you some of the important work our affiliates do across the country.

There were also bitter defeats.  I was trying to figure out how to put our feelings about the failure of the DREAM act into words when I heard President Barack Obama say this about the defeat: "That can't be who we are, to have kids, our kids, classmates of our children who are suddenly under this shadow of fear through no fault of their own. They didn't break a law, they were kids." I could not agree with him more. The fight continues to get the DREAM Act and immigration reform done.

Looking forward to the year ahead, the anti-immigrant and Islamaphobic policies and rhetoric of the past year require us to be vigilant in our ongoing defense of civil rights. Again, we must keep reminding ourselves: "This can't be who we are." Who we are is a society that believes in social justice for all.

The donations that poured into Asian Law Caucus during our year-end fundraising campaign affirmed for me that this is indeed who we are.  Thank you for your continued support.

Wishing everyone a wonderful new year filled with social justice,

Titi Liu
Executive Director

Each year, ALC helps nearly a thousand clients in our immigration program alone. As we look back on 2010, the Caucus was able to celebrate with our clients some difficult wins. This includes our victory fighting the deportation of 20 year old Steve Li who is DREAM Act eligible.

On September 15, 2010, ICE raided his home and Steve was taken to Arizona, where he spent over two months in detention. While Steve is ethnically Chinese, he was born in Peru and immigrated to the U.S. when he was only 12 years old. Here in the U.S., he studied hard and volunteered with his local church. He is currently enrolled in City College of San Francisco and studying to be a nurse.

Steve was arrested as part of ICE's fugitive operations program; a program that is intended to arrest potential terrorists by identifying those with final orders of removal. Instead, young people like Steve are swept up by ICE's directives. Steve was only 14 years old when he was ordered to be removed. He had no knowledge of the deportation order, and no control over his legal case.

ALC filed a deferred action request with ICE and pursued all organizing strategies to encourage Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer to issue a private bill. As a result of our advocacy, resolutions were passed unanimously to denounce the deportation of Steve Li by the City College of San Francisco Board of Trustees, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the San Francisco School Board.

At the last minute, Feinstein introduced a private bill to delay Steve's deportation to Peru, and Steve was released from deportation. Steve is home again in San Francisco, but his citizenship status is far from resolved. Despite this roadblock, Steve is hoping to get a work permit to look for a job, and plans on transferring to San Francisco State University for nursing school, with the goal of opening a free clinic for the immigrant community.

Since his release, Steve's priority is to push for the DREAM Act with ALC's ASPIRE immigrant student advocacy group, to help those still remaining detention centers. "I will never forget those people that I met inside," says Steve. "Their stories and faces will be with me for the rest of my life as I'm fighting for people who are law abiding, tax paying but are currently undocumented."

Steve's story and countless other cases demonstrate that we must be effective not only at representing individual clients, but also by moving the laws and policies that most directly impact our communities in the right direction.

On November 2, 2010, the Asian Law Caucus and Asian Law Alliance monitored elections operations in the Bay Area for the California gubernatorial election. 230 polling sites were inspected in Alameda, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and San Francisco Counties.

On the whole, officials from the Registrars of Voters of San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties and the Elections Department of San Francisco were swift to address the issues we raised to their attention. In most cases, election workers provided much-needed language assistance to limited English proficient (LEP) voters.

However, there were some issues that arose in all four counties over the availability of assistance offered to LEP voters. Additionally, officials from the Alameda County Registrar of Voters appeared overwhelmed with elections operations and unable to respond in a timely or appropriate manner.

"We encountered a wide-ranging set of problems that can be easily fixed but should have never been issues in the first place," said Christopher Punongbayan, Deputy Director of the Asian Law Caucus. "The law requires that assistance be given at polling sites where there are not high numbers of LEP voters, but we documented a number of instances where that simply did not happen," he added.

Chief problems indentified for Asian American and LEP voters included:

• Obstacles in obtaining adequate language assistance, such as unavailable or incomplete bilingual ballots
• Obstacles in obtaining adequate oral language assistance, such as insufficient numbers of bilingual education workers allocated to polling sites to assist LEP voters
• Voters forced to wait unnecessarily or being turned away due to language barriers
• Improper requests for identification before voters were allowed to cast their ballots

Asian American voters have historically faced obstacles in voting, and these preliminary findings substantiate the need for continued attention to the needs of LEP voters. For the most part, straightforward corrections in logistical coordination and adjustments in training would go far in addressing these issues.

For more information and to access Obstacles to Full and Equal Access to the Ballot for Limited English Proficient Voters, a report released by ALC and ALA, please visit http://www.asianlawcaucus.org/alc/publications/challenges-for-limited-english-proficient-voters/.

Omar Calimbas joined the Asian Law Caucus in January 2010 as the housing and elder law attorney.  Before ALC, he was a legal services attorney for almost seven years, covering a broad range of poverty law issues.  His focus on marginalized communities had taken him to the Northern Mariana Islands as a staff attorney with Micronesian Legal Services, serving human trafficking victims. Additionally, as a former attorney at Alaska Legal Services, he defended a Tlingit Indian in a federal criminal case involving indigenous fishing rights and successfully obtained a dismissal of the action.

Omar's previous experience has been helpful to ALC's housing program, which was without a staff attorney for the latter half of 2009.  "I'm honored to have played a part in rejuvenating the program," Omar says, "and judging from the over 230 clients that came to our doors this year, there seems to have been quite a line."  He observes that "the downturn in the economy may have slowed down gentrification, but it is also motivating landlords to find new ways to circumvent tenant rights and excessively raise rent or ignore poor housing conditions."

This year, Omar has assisted in stopping several unfair evictions in and prior to litigation.  The cases have ranged from disability discrimination against a newcomer family who recently secured Bayview public housing, to an ulterior motive to raise rent to market rate for a Chinatown flat that has been home to a three-generation family for the past ten years. "While the stories are varied," Omar points out, "those at risk remain the same - immigrants, working class families, those with limited English proficiency, the elderly and the disabled."

A second-generation Filipino American, Omar was born and raised in Chicago.  He also counts Houston, Austin, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Juneau, and Saipan as previous mailing addresses.  He met his wife, Melanie, in Saipan, and they were married last year in the Philippines.

Spotlight on the Asian American Institute, Chicago

Although government contracting programs are a crucial tool to level the playing field for minorities, the inclusion of Asian Americans in such programs continues to be challenged.  Insufficient data exists about the discrimination and disadvantage faced by Asian American businesses, and insufficient infrastructure exists to effectively organize these businesses.  These dangerous gaps have led some lawmakers to incorrectly conclude that Asian Americans do not face discrimination and are not a minority group that needs affirmative action. 

The Asian American Contractor Empowerment Project (AACEP) builds capacity within the community to defend and advance the participation of Asian Americans in minority contracting programs in the public and private sector. AACEP, headed by Asian American Justice Center (AAJC) and Asian American Institute (AAI), has developed a local and national network of minority business advocates and increased the number of Asian American business leaders supportive of affirmative action. Notably, in 2007 and again in 2009, AAI persuaded the Chicago City Council to include Asian Americans as a presumptive minority group in the City's construction contracting program.

Spotlight on the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, Los Angeles

Since the Asian Pacific American Legal Center's founding more than 27 years ago in Los Angeles, APALC's multilingual staff, pro bono attorneys, law clerks and interns have helped thousands of immigrant women and children break free of abusive relationships by helping them assert their legal rights.  In addition to assisting with family law issues including child custody and child support, APALC helps many of these clients obtain legal status in the United States.  Here's an example of a typical case handled by APALC:

For over 15 years, Xiao Mei suffered severe abuse from her boyfriend, who was the father of her child.  He would leave her for days without money for food and then threaten that he would rather kill her than give her money.  Xiao Mei was undocumented and financially dependent on her boyfriend.  When she tried to leave, her boyfriend attempted to strangle her.  He was later convicted of the violence against her.  APALC helped Xiao Mei obtain legal status through the U-Visa, a visa designed to help victims of crime, and then helped her obtain a green card.  She has now established a self-sufficient and stable life in the U.S., free of violence. 

Spotlight on the Asian American Justice Center, Washington, D.C.