This is a love letter to the people who helped bring out the Release MN 8 in us. An extended family who held firm in the face of injustice and who continues to fight against a system intended to further displace us.

Release MN 8 at the core is about love and family. Your gifts of your time, skills, and resources always kept the families at the center. You helped us translate our personal power into political power. You helped us learn the steps we needed to take, as we trudged through the tumultuous terrain of an extractive bureaucracy. Through practice, we learned how to draw resources from inside us. We learned that campaigns are made of people gifting what they could and asking for what they need. With you, we are a part of a loving ecosystem of people creating new pathways for immigrant justice.

MIRAC, AAOP, and Voices for Racial Justice—you helped us carry out our first public actions, including a rally in front of Senator Amy Klobuchar’s office and a press conference in front of Representative Keith Ellison’s office. You accompanied us as we lined up meetings with elected officials, invited media to bear witness, asked family and community to use their bodies and signs to share their message, and negotiated with law enforcement about our right to occupy public streets.

Mijente and Navigate—you showed up to our meetings and offered your deep frontline experiences stopping deportation proceedings. You taught us how to map power at each level of decision-making, from our local offices to federal offices.

Black Lives Matter-Minneapolis and -Twin Cities—you taught us how to test the boundaries of civil disobedience. You were with us, thinking through the purpose and practice of our direct actions, the skill of identifying and unsettling targets, and how best to use the power of making our stories public.

RadAzns—you helped us organize direct actions, like “ICE Monster” and “Not Home for the Holidays”. You helped us show the destructive nature and haunting presence of ICE on Release MN 8  families. You helped us bring out imagery in our story that people can hold onto.

Ryan Stopera, Oanh Vu, Josh Druyd, Boone Nguyen, Joua Lee, Kat Eng, Eli Edleson, Edwin Irwin, Thaiphy Phan Quang, Sarah Nichols, Sina Pleggenkuhle, and Tori Hong—you offered your visual storytelling genius. You helped us make giant “Not Home for the Holidays” postcards and the ICE Monster puppet. Your photos and online video profiles of each family allowed people to connect more deeply with their stories, and with the Release MN 8 campaign.

Southeast Asian Freedom Network—You are mycelium. You are the fiber that connects communities across the country. You generously offered your wealth of experience in stopping deportation proceedings in the Southeast Asian community.

University of Minnesota Law School’s James H. Binger Center for New Americans, Bruce Nestor, and Mai Neng Moua—you offered us lessons on navigating a confusing legal landscape and its seemingly insurmountable layers of paper (I-130, Stay of Removal, Motion to Reopen, Post-Conviction Relief, and on and on).

Coalition of Asian American Leaders, Multiracial Immigrant Coalition, and Thaomee

Xiong—you offered your deep experiences navigating the state and federal legislative process.  

Southeast Asian Resource Action Center and 18 Million Rising—you offered your national platforms to host call-ins, sign-on letters, press releases, convenings, and legislative visits to increase the visibility and expand the reach of Release MN 8 Campaign.

Showing Up for Racial Justice—you offered a network of people who mobilized and helped fundraise for relief and recovery work for MN8 families.

Interfaith Coalition—you offered prayer vigils in front of the Henry Whipple Building and packed the courthouse with peaceful, loving energy.

IKARE, Eastside Freedom Library, and Kolap—you offered free space for meetings, family dinners, film screenings, and community forums.

Thank you to others who donated, prepared meals, offered free meeting space, wrote letters, packed court rooms, showed up to actions, knocked on doors, organized education events, and talked to legislators.

The cumulative acts of love you offered the Release MN 8 campaign led to Ched, Sam, and Shorty’s families reclaiming their loved ones from the 15-year-old ICE monster. Through a recent University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development sponsored research trip, Posey got a chance to hug his wife, Allison, in Cambodia. Thanks to your gifts and your energy, there is a growing momentum of Southeast Asian people joining networks to stop deportations in United States.   

There is still a lot of work to do. The three men released are in the process of recovery from their period of detention. The men deported are figuring out how to create new lives after being violently uprooted and separated from their families. And still, many people still don’t know that this is happening.

Right now, we are working on three priorities:

1) hosting Family Dinners to bring people facing deportation issues together,

2) identifying legislative pathways to prevent deportations of Southeast Asian Minnesotans,

3) creating a toolkit for families who are experiencing similar deportation issues.

We hope more families who share similar struggles will join our family, our loving ecosystem. It’s the only way we’ll ensure more people have a deeper understanding of mass incarceration and deportation, and the damage they cause.

With Love and Solidarity,

Release MN8

Release MN8 is made up of family members of eight Cambodian Minnesotan men who were detained by ICE in August 2016. Most of these family members are women who have firsthand experience with the struggles of keeping a family afloat after a father, husband, breadwinner, and caretaker has been taken by an unjust immigration system. The MN8 came to the US as refugee children between the ages of 1 to 10 years old, after fleeing war and genocide during mass resettlement of the 1980’s. They have spent most of their lives in the US and were being held for deportation to a country they barely knew. Three of the MN8 were able to go back home to their spouses, children, and parents, while five were deported away from their families.

Art by Foreign Fauna