Judy Luo

Judy Luo
Centro para la Observación Migratoria y el Desarrollo Social en el Caribe (OBMICA)
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

I am soon to return to New York, marking the end of my time with OBMICA in Santo Domingo. With interviews to film with deportees’ families in New York, hours of footage to edit, and articles to pitch and write, I’m just at the beginning of the work I started over the summer. In addition to learning deeply about life after deportation this summer, I spent an equal amount of time pondering the question: who should be doing this work?

As soon as I landed in Santo Domingo, I knew I was going to have a tough summer ahead. Being a solo Asian woman made my work difficult in many ways. My being in public attracted attention and harassment, and filming in public was even more difficult.

When applying for this fellowship, I was wary of selecting my research topic since I am not directly connected to the community of deported Dominicans. I did not want to reproduce the top-down detached dynamic prevalent among Nonprofit Industrial Complex actors and organizations. I made a commitment to apply the spirit of what I have learned from my grassroots abolition work in New York to my work in Santo Domingo.

I tried my best to engage some of the principles of participatory action research. I had some meaningful conversations with folks I interviewed, where they seemed to emerge more aware of their potential and power to advocate for themselves. I practiced mutual aid in different ways. I made friendships beyond the researcher-subject relationship.

Despite all of this, however, factors such as limited time and my identity inevitably contributed towards reproducing the often exploitative relationship human rights actors have with directly impacted communities. At one point in the summer, I was extremely disillusioned with this reality, to the point where I felt the work that I was doing was meaningless. However, in those rare moments where I felt that the people I was working with recognized their own power—even if for a fleeting moment—I saw that something powerful could emerge in the horizontal alliance of advocates and the people they advocate for, a potential for that very delineation to be blurred.

I look forward to bringing forth the stories of Dominican deportees through my documentary, but I am most excited about the relationships I have built that will facilitate my ally work for the building of their own movement in the future.

Judy Luo
Centro para la Observación Migratoria y el Desarrollo Social en el Caribe (OBMICA)
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

The month of July is closing up, and I have been extremely busy traveling around the country doing interviews with different people in the deportee community. Many of my preconceived notions of people in this demographic have been subverted.

Firstly, there is a lot of socioeconomic diversity in the community, and according to one researcher here, stigmas about deportees vary accordingly. This researcher told me that Dominican deportees in the middle to upper classes (in the minority among deportees) feel like they have to hide their deportee status more, as it is considered a huge taboo in privileged spaces. However, in poor communities, a deportee identity is less stigmatized, but only among peers, as the larger Dominican society associates deportees with also being poor and criminals.

Secondly, I was surprised to learn that many deportees coming from the U.S. do not speak English. For some, it’s because they lived in the U.S. for a very short period of time, but for many others, even having spent 10+ years there, their English is very minimal. In hindsight, when reflecting on conditions that immigrants–particularly undocumented–face in the U.S., and thinking about my own immigrant parents, whose English is barely proficient, this no longer surprises me.

Much of the existing media and literature around the subject of deportees and their survival in exile hones in on the narrative of people who are American to the core and deserve to be back in their “real home.” The truth is, many deportees don’t fit into this tragic narrative of the displaced patriot. Many people miss the United States, but they equally love the Dominican Republic. Many people have children and family in the United States, but they also have large families that they love and care for here.

As someone with a multicultural and immigrant background, I deeply understand the complexities of “belonging” and “home.” I am currently ruminating on how I can best portray these nuances without falling back on the crutches of highlighting the “deserving immigrant” who is an assimilating, patriotic American.

Judy Luo
Centro para la Observación Migratoria y el Desarrollo Social en el Caribe (OBMICA)
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

When I arrived just over a month ago, I was surprised to learn that the new research initiative I was anticipating to assist with was no longer taking place. I was welcomed by OBMICA with complete freedom to execute a research project of my own. With Spanish that was still not quite proficient, and with zero formal research experience, I was flung into my summer’s work here in Santo Domingo.

The discussion that took place between Phillip Alston and Vasuki Nesiah at the fellowship dinner demonstrated powerfully the importance of relationships in human rights work. The first two weeks here were agonizingly slow, precisely because I lacked the relationships that could facilitate my research. For the first month and even now, I have spent most of my time building a web of research connections through meetings, phone calls, emails, and texts.

Much of my research work here reminds me of the investigative work I used to do for a public defense firm. It requires the same diligence, persistence, and flexibility. I scour existing research, comb through my personal contacts, and brainstorm indirectly related organizations for leads. They point me to other leads, and the process starts again. Luckily, people have been extremely helpful and kind to me, and I’ve had great success in my outreach efforts.

I’ve begun to conduct interviews with people in the community of Dominicans who were deported from the United States. I pass most of days talking to people, filming, and editing. The American media largely focuses on pre-deportation issues, but I believe the struggles of people post-deportation is a necessary part of the narrative in the fight for immigrant rights. Since I am no longer working on a formalized academic research project, I am more so taking the approach of investigative journalism. By the end of the summer, I hope to produce a short documentary about survival after deportation as well as pitch some pieces to different American media outlets.

Judy Luo
Centro para la Observación Migratoria y el Desarrollo Social en el Caribe (OBMICA)
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

My name is Judy Luo. I’m a third-year student at Gallatin studying carcerality (i.e., the broad terrain of social control, punishment, and discipline). Over the summer, I will be working as a research assistant with el Centro para la Observación Migratoria y el Desarrollo Social en el Caribe (OBMICA). OBMICA is a thinktank dedicated to issues associated with migration and social development in the Caribbean.

My human rights project is concerned with the lives of people post-deportation, particularly those who were exiled due to a criminal conviction. According to the 2017 ICE End of Year report, 89.2% of Enforcement and Removal Operations arrests were of people with a standing or pending criminal record. Deportees are subject to mental and physical trauma of a triple-tiered punishment regime: incarceration, detention, and deportation. Immediately upon their arrival to a country they likely have spent little time in, Dominican deportees are booked and marked as criminal. The import of the myth of the “American Dream” casts them as failures in the eyes of the general population. The stigmatizing mark of “deportee-criminal” shadows them everywhere, rendering them structurally vulnerable to human rights violations. Dominican deportees face great difficulty finding work and housing, accessing health care services, avoiding police harassment, and forging a place in their new communities. Family separation and cultural alienation contributes to high rates of depression, anxiety, and a host of other mental health issues.

Through speaking to some researchers and activists who are engaged in this work, I have discovered that there are no standing organizations dedicated to supporting this population. This summer, I will be contributing to OBMICA’s new research initiative, which seeks to consolidate updated information on the living conditions and survival of Dominican deportees. One challenge that I expect to be constantly grappling with is working with a community that I am not a part of. In our seminar this year, we’ve explored in depth how Orientalism often plagues human rights work. A wholly insufficient but necessary step I can take to addressing this is diving into the work with wide-open ears and readiness to learn. I intend to apply the grassroots spirit I’ve acquired through prison abolition organizing here in New York to my summer work in Santo Domingo.