Filipinos and immigration sweeps: When belonging is conditional

We become animate in the growth of Kansas wheat or in the ring of Mississippi rain. We tremble in the strong winds of the Great Lakes. We cut timbers in Oregon just as the wild flowers blossom in Maine. We are multitudes in Pennsylvania mines, in Alaskan canneries. We are millions from Puget Sound to Florida… But sometimes we wonder if we are really part of America. – Carlos Bulosan, Filipino labor activist and author (1943)

In July 2025, Congress approved unprecedented funding for mass detention and deportation. The vulnerability for Filipinos is acute—and has deep roots. In the wake of Spain’s defeat in the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Philippines and the United States became inextricably linked. Spain was forced to cede sovereignty of Guam and Puerto Rico and, for $20 million, the Philippines. For the next fifty years, the Southeast Asian archipelago marked “the far edge of the United States’ overseas empire,” whose expansion, historian Stefan Aune writes in his 2021 study, was “driven, in part, by a virulently racist paternalism that assumed non-white peoples were incapable of self-government.”

Filipinos lived as colonial subjects who could migrate to work in California’s fields and the canneries of Alaska but were disallowed from becoming citizens and often met with hostility. The first anti-Filipino riots erupted in Yakima Valley, Washington in 1927. By 1930, mobs of over 700 hundred terrorized Filipino farmworkers in and around Watsonville, California for five continuous days and nights. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, “In the days and weeks before the rioting, politicians and community leaders had ramped up their anti-Filipino rhetoric, calling the farmworkers ‘a menace’ and demanding that Filipino residents be deported so ‘white people who have inherited this country for themselves and their offspring could live.’”   

In 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, Congress sought to satisfy white Americans’ demands for restrictions on foreign labor and passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act which reclassified Filipinos as “aliens” and capped immigration to 50 people per year. Then came World War II. More than 250,000 Filipinos fought for the United States against Japan, nearly half of whom died in combat. Those who survived were promised full veterans’ benefits. But in February 1946, Congress passed the Rescissions Acts of 1946, stripping them of payment they had earned. 

In the 1960s, demand for healthcare skyrocketed in the United States. American hospitals, desperate for nurses, recruited heavily from the Philippines, where nurses had been trained in colonial-era schools that taught American medical practices or in American nursing schools themselves. From 1966 until 1991, at least 35,000 Filipino nurses immigrated to the United States and played an essential role in the American healthcare system. According to the NIH Record, 5% of nurses in the United States were trained in the Philippines and many served on the frontlines of the Covid pandemic (24% of whom, tragically died from Covid-19 complications).

Today, there are more than 2 million Filipino immigrants in the United States, the fourth largest immigrant population in America. The arc from colonial subjects to essential workers to deportation targets—reflected in the conversations below—reveals how conditional the American promise has been for many in the community.

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Simran Sethi is a Media Fellow at the Nova Institute for Health that provided financial support for this series: Unseen: The Impact of Trump’s Draconian Immigration Policies on Asians in America. Kat Tan is an independent video and audio producer. If you or your loved ones are impacted by current immigration policies, Tanggol Migrante (Defend Migrants) is an alliance of U.S.-based organizations dedicated to defending and protecting Filipinos that has launched FFIND (Families of Filipinos in Detention). Additional support can be found in our ICE Encounters and Family Preparedness guides.