The last time Casty Souvannaxab saw her husband as a free man in America was on a late March morning in the parking lot of the U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Warwick.
He was there for his annual ICE check-in, she recalls.“ And he was like,‘ Something bad is going to happen.’ But I was optimistic:‘ You don’ t even have a parking ticket. You’ ve done everything right as someone who has been rehabilitated. Why would they detain you?’”
Vanhhatdy“ Lay” Souvannaxab was a child of the second wave of Southeast Asians who resettled in Rhode Island after the Vietnam War. By 1987, some 12,000 Cambodians, Vietnamese and Laotians fleeing devastation and unrest entered the U. S. as permanent aliens, under a federal law intended to address the humanitarian crisis. Laos, Souvannaxab’ s home country, had been the target of a covert bombing campaign that dropped two million tons of ordnance on a country roughly the size of Oregon.
These new Americans brought their war traumas to the low-income, high-crime urban neighborhoods where they were placed. Some youth protected themselves by forming gangs. In 2011, Souvannaxab served time for a pipe bomb incident that wounded the mother of a gang member. He served seven years. His conviction for an“ aggravated felony,” a designation in immigration law for offenses ranging from murder to petty theft with a one-year sentence, triggered a deportation order. But he stayed under ICE supervision, because Laos wasn’ t accepting deportees at the time.
Lay straightened out his life. And his past seemed far removed from the couple’ s present as workers, homeowners and the parents of two teenagers. Lay wanted a couple more years to build his moral character so he could change his status, but he ran out of time: He was deported to Laos on Memorial Day in 2025. Since then, Casty has coped with periods of silence when her husband was not permitted to communicate and frantic searches for a trustworthy Lao sponsor so he could leave the government detention center. Worry about the finances— to support two households and pay for airplane tickets to Laos to reunite the family— has stretched her secretary’ s salary and her nerves.
“ There are days when I want to give up. Your husband over there and your kids over here. What am I supposed to do?”
The worst is watching her son and daughter deny themselves sneakers or snacks to save money, she says. Her composure breaks and a single tear traces a silver path on her cheek.
“ They’ re kids. They shouldn’ t have to worry about what you’ re going through.”
For the last century, immigration has been a political pinata, swinging on the string of public opinion. Most U. S. citizens support legal immigration and acknowledge the importance of immigrants, says Colleen Putzel, an analyst with the Migration Policy Institute.“ People tend to rebuff immigration when there’ s a sense that it’ s out of control.”
In 2024, immigration reached a record high, with more than 50.2 million immigrants comprising 14.8 percent of the U. S. population, according to the institute. More than three-quarters are here legally under a permanent or temporary status. Rhode Island had an estimated 81,000 noncitizens, 50,000 of whom were undocumented, according to a recent report by the Economic Progress Institute, the Latino Policy Institute and the Immigration Research Initiative. President Donald Trump campaigned to secure borders and remove undocumented immigrants and“ the worst of the worst.” He delivered“ an all-of-government approach to immigration— vast changes across the board across the entire spectrum of immigration and across the entire spectrum of the government,” Putzel says.
American history is littered with so many legislative reactions to perceived threats to the workforce, national security or American culture that over time, the immigration system has become a complex“ Frankenstein-ian monster” of laws, regulations, policies and statuses, says Sarah Cade, a former immigration prosecutor and judge.“ Depending on who you are,
78 RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY I JULY 2026