High school junior Maya Do spent the weeks leading up to today’s kickoff of Tet tucking crisp bills into red envelopes, picking ao dai dresses to wear with friends and preparing a speech to deliver to hundreds at her first protest.
Do, 16, was born in Vietnam. Her mother immigrated to the United States in the 1980s. Her father, along with countless Viet Kieu refugees, found a pathway to U.S. citizenship and a home in Orange County after Saigon’s fall in 1975. Both lived again in Vietnam for a period, where they met and started their family, before returning to the United States.
This year, amid ramped-up U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the county, Do said she’s speaking up to affirm her family and community’s place in Little Saigon.
Do, who is now an American citizen, is among thousands of youth in the county, many of whom are too young to drive, never mind cast a vote, who’ve mobilized for immigrant rights by walking out of classes, protesting and raising their voices in opposition to the Trump administration’s nationwide immigration enforcement efforts.
Do said for her, Tet — a holiday that celebrates the end of one lunar new year and the start of the next — comes with opportunistic meaning.
“Tet is an event that, for many second-generation Vietnamese Americans like me, is one of the few, non-Western events where we just connect to our culture,” she said.
“This year it has to represent the resilience of our community, right here in Little Saigon.”
‘It was a battle to establish the community’
Do, a La Quinta High School student, joined hundreds of activists, youth and community members beneath Garden Grove’s clock tower on Jan. 31, part of nationwide protests in solidarity with immigration protests in Minneapolis following the fatal shootings of two civilians by immigration officers.
“In our U.S. history class, we’ve been learning about the early 1900s. And as I read my textbook, I’m shocked by how much of today’s issues reflect those from over a century ago — especially the same, anti-immigrant and racist attitudes and the fear spread by the government against people who dare to speak out,” Do told the crowd that included her parents.
“But history also teaches us something powerful,” Do said. “Change happens when people raise their voices.”
Vietnamese youth like Do, born out of a Little Saigon community rooted in mass immigration, are speaking up in hopes of raising awareness and pressing their elected representatives to provide resources for community members affected by the raids.
Some youth are speaking in place of their relatives and neighbors who, for risk of deportation, fear speaking up for themselves; and others, spurred by a desire to embrace their heritage, are now pushing back on presumptions that the community’s footing in Orange County was historically invulnerable.
More than 622,000 immigrants across the nation were arrested for deportation last year, a Department of Homeland Security report said.
The stepped-up immigration enforcement, promised by President Donald Trump during his campaign to return to the Oval Office, is focused on arresting and deporting dangerous felons, according to administration officials, who say the effort is achieving that goal.
But critics, including Do, call the program inhumane and argue the raids are taking in people without criminal records and, in some cases, have even included U.S. citizens.
Vietnamese residents make up about 16% of Orange County’s immigrant and refugee population. And Orange County’s now-famed Little Saigon was born from the flight of refugees in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
Since immigration enforcement efforts saw renewed fervor in Orange County last spring, Little Saigon has been among the targets for raids. But an agreement the United States signed with Vietnam during Trump’s first term in office also makes Orange County’s Vietnamese community more vulnerable to deportation.
It created a process for deporting immigrants who entered the country before 1995, the period when many in Little Saigon immigrated among the large waves of refugees fleeing the 1975 fall of Saigon, not long after the United States bowed out of the Vietnam War.
A dozen or more of these “pre-95” immigrants, who’ve regularly checked in with ICE while awaiting travel documents, have been detained during this otherwise routine process, according to data provided by the nonprofit Harbor Institute for Immigrant and Economic Justice.
And, the county also saw a slight rise last year in voluntary ICE referrals by local law enforcement, the nonprofit said data it obtained shows, of which 30%, or around 70 people, were Vietnamese.
Vietnamese community members were the demographic most vulnerable to requests from ICE for potential deportation, the Harbor Institute said.
“I think there is a perception, amongst Vietnamese people themselves, that we were welcome here,” said Dwight Hua, the youth coordinator for VietRISE, a county-based nonprofit founded in 2018 to support Vietnamese and immigrant communities.
“That was sort of the dominant narrative, and I think some people were pushing that,” Hua said. “But the reality is that was not the case.”
Hua, 25, referenced a Pew Research study published in 2015, which found that following the final collapse of South Vietnam in 1975, “Americans were deeply divided” on whether some 130,000 Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians, evacuated by the U.S. in their flight from the new communist government, should be allowed to live in the U.S.
“In a May 1975 Harris poll, for example, 37% were in favor, 49% opposed, and 14% weren’t sure,” the study said. “Nonetheless, the refugees were allowed to stay.”
And in the late 1980s, after Little Saigon found official recognition, freeway and street signs directing people to the community were frequently defaced and destroyed in disapproval, Hua said.
“It was a battle to establish the community, and I think people sometimes forget that,” Hua said.
Do said she learned about the Vietnam War and the United States’ relationship with her birth country in her history class; that knowledge sparked an abiding interest in foreign relations and history.
Do, whose involvement with VietRISE spans back to 2024, said the organization gave her the opportunity to explore her community further.
She remembers canvassing door-to-door with another VietRISE member to survey Vietnamese mobile home residents on issues they were experiencing around evictions and infractions. They saw a house, “it had MAGA all over, Trump 2028,” and for a moment, Do said she hesitated to knock.
“But we did, and this elderly Vietnamese woman came out and we spoke to her in Vietnamese,” Do said. ”And out of all the residents we talked to, she was the most open to talking to us.”
Before speaking to more Vietnamese community members face-to-face, Do said she believed the community to be irreparably polarized in its political beliefs.
“So it made me aware of these kinds of community issues that are going on regardless of our political stance or beliefs. And these things that are sometimes so normalized or not talked about, we need to address them,” she said. “We need to be talking about what’s happening right here, next door.”
‘Tết is supposed to be about bringing people together’
Pacifica High School senior Seven Zenor’s best Tet memories include browsing the Asian Garden Mall in Westminster with family, lighting firecrackers and playing traditional Vietnamese board games.
“I just love the energy around it,” Zenor, 18, said of the holiday. “It’s really impactful for me because it just brings family together, friends together, so many people together. That’s what Tet is about.”
This year, however, his grandparents’ home is uncharacteristically devoid of Tet decorations, he said of the dampened spirits this holiday and fears of becoming a target.
“I’m so sad to see my grandparents not celebrating it,” Zenor said. “What if we go to my temple or have a firecracker celebration and ICE comes in and just starts taking people away? Tet is supposed to be about bringing people together, not a time when you’re scaring people with division.”
His grandparents are citizens, but Zenor said he fears they’d be unable to defend themselves in English if approached by immigration enforcement.
Zenor said he supports immigration enforcement, so long as it targets criminals and “not innocents.” But, he argues the Trump administration’s raids are not always doing that and, instead, “are sometimes deporting people based on color.”
To protest the raids, Zenor helped organize Pacifica High’s Jan. 20 walkout by spreading word of the plans on social media.
More than 50 students left their final-period classes at 2 p.m. that day, wielding signs and demonstrating on the corner of Lampson Avenue and Knott Street, part of the nationwide “Free America” walkout to demand an end to the immigration enforcement campaign.
Sophia Tran, 16, a Bolsa Grande High School student, attended Garden Grove City Council meetings last year where she was one of dozens of speakers to press the elected leaders to at least post a know-your-rights resource page on the city’s website.
Tran says she’s speaking up in spite of her parents, who are aware of her activism but don’t necessarily weigh in. It’s not a conversation that’s had at the dinner table, she said. Her family seldom discusses politics or anything related to their personal backstory.
“It just leads to arguments,” Zenor said, adding he felt similarly. The majority of his family, he said, supports the current immigration campaign despite having immigrated from Vietnam themselves.
Tran joined VietRISE wanting to learn “more about Vietnamese history and the community itself.”
Tran spent last summer canvassing door-to-door about the community’s thoughts on everything from rent control to noncitizen voting, when she had “this kind of awakening about the issues in our community.”
“When I was talking about noncitizen voting, I saw the good and bad refugee narrative. I saw these intergenerational divisions,” she said. “I think advocacy is so hard to push for in the Vietnamese community because of those divisions. And because of the language barriers, because of those heritage barriers.”
Part of VietRISE’s goal and the goal of so many youth who’ve spoken out, Hua said, is to press elected representatives to advance immigrant rights, housing justice and government accountability.
“It’s important to listen to what our young people are telling us and what they want to see for our community,” he said. “Because they are the inheritors of what we’re building here.”
“They feel compelled enough to walk out of their classrooms, to take time out of their day to organize rallies, to speak up on social media in the face of backlash, in the face of people who disagree with them,” Hua said. “Tell them that this is not a worthwhile endeavor.”
Garden Grove Councilmember Cindy Ngoc Tran, who in November abstained from voting on whether the city should post a know-your-rights immigration resource page for fiscal concerns, said she supports students’ right to take a stand.
“When the students walk out there, that’s how we know, as lawmakers, that something is not right and we need to fix it,” she said, adding she supports Trump’s immigration enforcement campaign, but disapproves of citizens being caught in the crossfire.
“As high schoolers, I think that sometimes we don’t have the right to vote, but we’re still constituents,” Do said. “So in that way, I think it’s really valid to speak up on these issues. I don’t think it’s good to expect high schoolers to kind of keep their minds away from being civically engaged and thinking critically.”
Speaking up “does take work, it takes organizing, it takes people going out of their way, missing classes,” she said. “It’s not an easy thing to do.”