CA's newest state park

Climate & Environment

Unusual design uses nature-based climate solutions

By Jonaki Mehta, Christopher Intagliata, Alisa Chang | NPR

Published July 25, 2024 1:00 PM

An image shows a dirt road cutting through a floodplain. The air is slightly misty.

A view from the Oak Tree Grove, photographed June 28, 2024 in Dos Rios located in Modesto, California

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Geloy Concepcion

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NPR

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Topline:

It's a floodplain, recently transformed into California's newest state park.

The park opened this summer, emerging among the never-ending rows of agriculture the valley is known for. It's a lush 2.5 square miles now bursting with hundreds of thousands of native trees, bushes and animals.

The importance of the park: It isn’t like most state parks. In addition to bringing much-needed green space to an underserved area, its unusual design uses nature-based climate solutions that reinvigorate native wildlife.

By restoring the natural floodplain, the park will also help mitigate flooding that threatens residents in the area.

Go deeper: To learn about the stewards of the park and the future of California's newest state park.

At the crack of dawn in California’s Central Valley, birds sing their morning songs and critters chirp unabashedly. In a shady grove next to a river, an owl swoops down from the spindling branches of an oak tree that has stood its ground for centuries.

A few feet above the tree’s base, its massive trunk is lined with a white ring, indicating how high the San Joaquin River rose during a flood last year. Dos Rios is supposed to flood — it’s a floodplain, recently transformed into California's newest state park.

The park opened this summer, emerging among the never-ending rows of agriculture the valley is known for. It's a lush 2.5 square miles now bursting with hundreds of thousands of native trees, bushes and animals.

Dos Rios, named for the Tuolumne and San Joaquin rivers that meet at the edge of the park, is the first new California state park in more than a decade.

But it isn’t like most state parks. In addition to bringing much-needed green space to an underserved area, its unusual design uses nature-based climate solutions that reinvigorate native wildlife.

By restoring the natural floodplain, the park will also help mitigate flooding that threatens residents in the area.

Transforming farms fields back to a floodplain

Dos Rios is like a time machine. Just 15 years ago, this plot of land looked much like its surroundings.

“These floodplains were once laser-leveled fields that grew alfalfa, or a rotation of corn and winter wheat, which would be harvested and moved over to where the dairies are to feed the cows,” says conservationist Julie Rentner.

Now, the land looks more like it did hundreds of years ago, before farms and towns cropped up, before the Central Valley became an agricultural hub of America.

A woman with pale skin stares into the camera, wearing a striped shirt under a black pullover jacket

Rentner is president of the nonprofit organization River Partners, which began the process of purchasing the plot from a farming family back in 2008. Since then, her team has been transforming the land to return it to some semblance of the floodplain it naturally was.

“Most of the critters here, the willows, the cottonwoods, the mugwort and the gum plants are actually stimulated by occasional flooding,” she says.

In the summer months, the San Joaquin and Tuolumne rivers flow lazily around the edges of this park, but in the spring and early summer, when snow melts in the Sierras, the rivers take on a forceful character, rampaging through this land, swelling above their banks and flooding this area.

Last year, the rivers rose about 20 feet higher than they are now. At the time, River Partners was giving boat tours through the area, as floodwaters brought back animals like river otters, beavers and waterfowl.

The image shows a river with yellowish dried out shrubs in the foreground, with a deep blue-green river flowing in the background.

Working with nature to tame floodwater risk

While flooding is now welcome at Dos Rios, for Central Valley farmers and residents, it has long been a demon. It destroys crops and homes.

A 2018 report from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and its state partners said that Stockton, a large metropolitan city about 30 miles north of Dos Rios, faced an “unacceptably high risk of flooding from levee failure.” Dos Rios is meant to be an escape valve, before torrents of water threaten levees in nearby places like Stockton.

“This place is reducing flood risk for downstream communities by absorbing floodwaters as they pour out of the Sierra Nevadas,” Rentner says.

Reengineering Dos Rios involved cutting holes into berms and levees, and allowing the rivers to flood instead of attempting to constrain them. The floodwaters then soak into the ground, sparing nearby communities, and recharging groundwater. These, Rentner says, are solutions designed to work with nature instead of against it.

A woman looking through a window, wearing a green shirt and a native necklace

Another community that could benefit from Dos Rios is Grayson, a small, unincorporated area just a few miles west of the park. Lilia Lomeli-Gil, a community leader there, remembers suffering from the devastating floods of 1997. At the time, she was living in Modesto, just east of Dos Rios.

“It still brings tears to my eyes,” she says, as she recalls her house swamped with 3 to 4 feet of water. “We had to start over, we were homeless.”

Eventually, Lomeli-Gil and her husband were able to relocate back to Grayson, where she has spent most of her life. Now she says she is relieved that Dos Rios is in Grayson’s backyard — not only because of flood-risk mitigation, but also because it’s a new place to recreate.

“A place to go barbecue, join other family members,” and it’s a place to appreciate nature for local community members, she says. “I think that emotionally, it’s going to be very good for their mental health.”

Grayson is a tiny, 4-by-5-block farming community. Most of the residents are agricultural workers. The community center Lomeli-Gil runs is the only gathering place in town for residents, other than the gas station market next door.

“We need more, we need a variety, not just one place,” she says.

Two people wearing sweaters looking at a sign that reads "Dos Rios"

A new place to enjoy nature

At 8:30 on a recent Friday morning, Lomeli-Gil had gathered a group of parents, teenagers and young children from Grayson around some picnic benches on the edge of an old riverbank at Dos Rios. Everyone in the group speaks Spanish, like most of the surrounding community, so their tour guides, Eduardo Gonzalez and Julian Morin, lead the group through a portion of the park in English and Spanish.

“We want to continue to increase accessibility to parks, they're out here for everybody,” says Morin. “Language barriers shouldn't be why people can't get out and enjoy state parks and experience everything they have to offer.”

Gonzalez leads the group on a walking path that, in a way, divides the past and future of this park: An old almond orchard is on one side, and a lush landscape of bushes, trees, birds and animals on the other.

A group of people walking down a dirt road wearing an assortment of clothes

In Spanish, Gonzalez says, “12 years ago this was all pure orchard, and [River Partners] removed them.” Pointing to the other side of the path, where birds are chirping loudly, he says, “And they began to plant more native plants that were here before agriculture.”

He tells the group that like the rest of the park, that almond orchard will eventually become a campground or a place for families to gather. The park will also offer family events like group campfires and stargazing nights. When school is in session, the park plans to organize educational visits for students.

Opening up the land to indigenous people, as a place to gather plants

The Dos Rios team has also consulted with Indigenous tribes about how this new park can benefit their communities. Austin Stevenot, the San Joaquin field manager for River Partners, first came across the organization a few years ago when they invited his extended family to visit the park.

Stevenot and his family are members of the Northern Sierra Miwok tribe. Stevenot consulted his mother and aunts, founding members of the California Indian Basketweavers’ Association. They put together planting palettes of native plants — like a mood board for plants — that would be beneficial to the habitat, but also for Indigenous medicinal and cultural practices.

“All the things we were like, ‘It would be great to gather this here!’”

A bearded man wearing a blue blouse while wearing a blue hat that has white text that reads: "River"

Stevenot brought members of local tribes to plant native shrubs like Valley Sedge, which is used for basket weaving, or mugwort, used as a natural bug repellent. Now, a 3-acre Native Use Garden is blooming at Dos Rios.

A century ago, he says, his people were forcibly removed from their ancestral village, about 60 miles from here. So it means a lot to him to have a piece of this land his family and other Indigenous people can use as their own.

“It looks like a big weed patch right now. But there's a lot here. There's a lot of meaning here,” he says.

Though removing plants from public lands is typically illegal, a 2016 rule permits parks to enter into plant-gathering agreements with Native American tribes. Stevenot says tribal members can reach out to the park to inquire about accessing the Native Use Garden now, but their goal is for the park to eventually implement a formal permitting process for tribal members to gather anywhere in Dos Rios.

“We need thousands more acres just like this,” he says. “Not just not for just water, not for habitat, but for the people of the land, for the people that were here long before anybody else.”

"10 more Dos Rioses" in the next 10 years

Dos Rios holds great promise for the Central Valley — it provides new recreational space, restores native habitat, protects against flood damage and recharges dwindling groundwater in the Central Valley. But it’s only about 2½ square miles in a vast region dominated by agricultural farms, and even restoring that much land has been no easy task.

“Here in the Central Valley, we have a history of fighting over water, really being at odds with the environmental movement,” says Julie Rentner. But she adds that over the years, the community surrounding Dos Rios has shown great excitement about its multiple benefits.

A man whose wearing a blue blouse holds a piece of mugwort in his hand

“You talk to anybody in this neighborhood and you realize, oh my gosh, we all want the same things,” she says. “We want clean, healthy communities to live in. We want beautiful places to be able to take our kids and grandkids.”

And she says California’s state government is on board with more projects like Dos Rios, as evidenced by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2020 executive order, which has been dubbed the “30 x 30” initiative, because it aims to conserve 30% of California’s lands and coastal waters by the year 2030. “And that encouraged us to think, how do you scale all of this?”

Rentner is optimistic. “We’ve done the planning, we’ve done the mapping,” she says, “We’re thinking about doing 10 more Dos Rioses just in the next decade. Maybe more.”

Copyright NPR 2024

Civics & Democracy

CA ICE lawsuits

Senate bill would expose agents to legal action

By Guy Marzorati | KQED

Published January 27, 2026 5:48 PM

A peron stands with outstretched hands in front of a row of uniformed deputies in gas masks. The road is littered with what appears to be spent tear gas canisters.

An anti-ICE protester challenges deputies in Paramount.

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Carlin Stiehl

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Getty Images

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Topline:

A bill that would make it easier for Californians to sue immigration agents and other federal officials for civil rights violations sailed through the state Senate on Tuesday.

Why it matters: Senate Bill 747, dubbed the No Kings Act, would create a first-in-the-nation legal pathway for residents to seek financial damages in state court for excessive force, false arrest and other violations of constitutional rights committed by federal officers.

Why now: The bill was written by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco. If state or local law enforcement officers had shot Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two people recently killed by federal agents in Minneapolis, they could be held financially liable, he said.

How we got here: The measure passed the state Senate on a 30-10 party-line vote, with Republicans arguing the bill could expose local police to more lawsuits.

Read on ... for more on the bill and the larger national context.

A bill that would make it easier for Californians to sue immigration agents and other federal officials for civil rights violations sailed through the state Senate on Tuesday.

Senate Bill 747, dubbed the No Kings Act, would create a first-in-the-nation legal pathway for residents to seek financial damages in state court for excessive force, false arrest and other violations of constitutional rights committed by federal officers.

The bill was written by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco. If state or local law enforcement officers had shot Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two people recently killed by federal agents in Minneapolis, they could be held financially liable, he said.

“But under current law, it’s almost impossible to file that same lawsuit against a federal agent who does the same thing,” Wiener said. “If the federal government won’t hold these agents accountable for violating the Constitution, we will.”

The measure passed the state Senate on a 30-10 party-line vote, with Republicans arguing the bill could expose local police to more lawsuits.

Tuesday’s vote is the latest move by Democrats in the state Legislature to create a bulwark against the Trump administration’s deportation crackdown.

Last year, lawmakers set aside $25 million for legal nonprofits to defend residents facing detention or deportation. They also approved a bill, written by Wiener, to prohibit local and federal law enforcement officers from wearing masks on duty — which is currently facing a legal challenge from the Trump administration.

SB 747’s supporters said it would give Californians a chance to hold federal officials accountable in a way that can be difficult under current law.

Border patrol agents, most masked and wearing sunglasses, walk down a sidewalk with some cameras recording them.

“Today we are deliberating an issue to try to solve and also remedy the fear that folks are living with,” said Senate President pro Tem Monique Limón, D-Santa Barbara. “In combination with the fact that we have not seen due process.”

Wiener argued that existing law makes it difficult for victims to receive damages in federal court. For example, the Federal Tort Claims Act protects the government from liability arising from decisions made by individual officers and requires plaintiffs to first file an administrative claim.

Supporters of SB 747 include the Prosecutors Alliance, a coalition of progressive district attorneys, and Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice, which advocates for immigrants in California’s Inland Empire.

The bill is opposed by organizations representing California police officers, sheriffs and Highway Patrol officers.

They argued the change will undercut an existing state law, known as the Bane Act, which requires Californians who sue law enforcement officials to show that a civil rights violation was accomplished through “threats, intimidation, or coercion.”

“The question before you is not whether accountability should exist, but what creating a second, overlapping state system actually adds — other than more litigation and more risk for those on the front lines,” said Sen. Suzette Martinez Valladares, R-Santa Clarita.

During debate on the Senate floor, Wiener said local police officers and sheriffs can already be sued under federal law for violating constitutional rights.

“The liability that local and state police officers face will be the same after this is signed into law as before,” Wiener said. “It doesn’t change that.”

Senate Bill 747 now heads to the state Assembly.

In an analysis of SB 747, staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote, “the bill is very likely to be challenged by the federal government if signed into law.”

A scrappy start

To understand what it took to get here, we’ll go back to 1872. Back then, the city of L.A. only had about 6,000 residents. Dirt roads were everywhere and agriculture was king.

The region was still fresh off the transition to American rule, and local leaders were just starting to dream up what the city could look like, especially in the downtown area.

There was no “LAPL” during this time — a group called the Los Angeles Library Association attended to local reading needs. John Szabo, current L.A. city librarian, says that early system was pretty bare bones.

“ It was a very small one room library with a handful of books,” he told host Larry Mantle on LAist 89.3’s AirTalk.

That was in the Downey Block building at Temple and Main streets, which is where the Federal Courthouse stands today. There were newspaper racks and shelves with about 750 books, while another space had checkers and chess — because what more do you need to fuel young minds?

A blacka and white archival film negative of the Downey Block building on the street corner, with cobblestone streets, horse-drawn wagon, and water fountain in the foreground. The awnings and windows of the Downey Block storefronts have signs including: "Dr. Crawford, Dentist," "Dr. U.D. Reed, Dentist," "Maier & Zobelein Pilsener, Beer on Draught," "John Brown Our Best 5 Cigar ... 301 J.N. Rushton" at 301 N. Main Street, and "303 New-York Clothing House." The edge of Hazard and Harpham Patent Office can be seen attached to upper floor of building in upper left of image.

The city needed a lot more because of rapid growth, but money was an issue. To help meet the demand, the association became an official city department in 1878. That allowed local officials to fund their new “Los Angeles Public Library.”

Over the years, LAPL would open satellite “reading rooms” and branch libraries. However, the main collection was expanding quickly. The books were essentially couch-surfing for years. They moved four times into different rented spaces, including into City Hall in 1889.

This was a temporary home that lasted for a couple of decades. Then, the effort to build a central library picked up steam. One of those was with a plan to put it in Pershing Square, but the project went awry. So the collection moved again — this time into a department store building (while it was still running), between women’s clothes and furniture, where it stayed for six years.

A new, innovative library

When Everett Perry, an energetic city librarian, took the helm in 1911, he lobbied for years for a central library to be created.

Finally, a decade later, voters passed a measure for a $2 million bond to pay for a new dedicated building. That would become the Central Library we have today. L.A. was a little late among large U.S. cities for getting a central library, but it finally opened in July 1926.

A black and white archival view of the ornate mosaic-like dome of the library's rotunda. The sunburst image located directly above the globe chandelier mirrors the sunburst design of the pyramid on top of the building. A chandelier hangs from the rotunda's ceiling, composed of cast bronze, is part of a model of the solar system.

The building was designed by New York architect Bertram Goodhue with art deco and Egyptian influence, common motifs of the time.

It’s elaborately decorated with murals, mosaics and sculptures. For example, black marble sphinxes sit inside and a mosaic tile pyramid with a handheld torch makes up the roof. Szabo says it was well received by Angelenos.

“ Of course I’m biased, but I think it’s the most beautiful library in the world,” Szabo said. “ [It was] a great sense of pride in a growing city, sort of putting L.A. on the map.”

News

Genocide survivor seized

Sithy Yi detained at immigration check-in

Jordan Rynning holds local government accountable, covering city halls, law enforcement and other powerful institutions.

Published January 27, 2026 2:27 PM

A woman and her three daughters stand in front of a hanging quilt.

San Croucher and her three daughters, Sithy Yi, Sithea San and Jennifer Diep at Kamput Refugee Camp, Thailand, in 1981. Photo was taken after the family fled genocide in Cambodia.

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Courtesy Sithea San

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Topline:

Sithy Yi fled genocide in Cambodia and came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1981. She was detained Jan. 8 at a regular immigration check-in in Santa Ana, and her lawyer, Kim Luu-Ng, says Yi is being held unlawfully at the Adelanto detention center.

Yi’s lawyer sued to have her released: After receiving protections against being deported to Cambodia and cooperating with law enforcement in a case against her abuser, Luu-Ng claims that federal immigration officials detained Yi two weeks ago as a form of punishment and to instill fear in immigrant communities.

Others with pending visas also at risk of deportation: The Immigration Center for Women and Children (ICWC) and other immigrant rights organizations sued the Department of Homeland Security last year over new immigration enforcement policies.

Erika Cervantes, an attorney representing ICWC in the case, told LAist that until early 2025 there was a presumption that victims who came forward to help law enforcement would be protected, but she claims some of those protections have been unlawfully removed. She said hundreds of people have been affected by the policy changes.

LAist reached out to DHS and ICE, but have not received comment at the time of publication.

Read on ... for more about Sithy Yi’s story and changes in how immigration enforcement agencies treat victims of crime, torture and human trafficking.

Sithy Yi fled genocide in Cambodia and came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1981. She was detained earlier this month at a regular immigration check-in in Santa Ana, and her lawyer, Kim Luu-Ng, says Yi is being held unlawfully at the Adelanto detention center.

Luu-Ng said Yi was ordered by an immigration court to be removed from the country in 2016, but her removal was withheld out of concerns she would be tortured if she returned to Cambodia.

After 10 years complying with ICE instructions and initiating a still-pending visa application, Luu-Ng claims that federal immigration officials detained Yi two weeks ago as a form of punishment and to instill fear in immigrant communities.

Yi is one of potentially hundreds of people with pending visa applications meant to protect victims of crime or human trafficking whose status has been abruptly put at risk by immigration policy changes ordered by the Trump administration, Luu-Ng and other immigration attorneys told LAist.

Yi cannot be deported back to Cambodia, her attorney said. Luu-Ng said immigration officials have not told her where Yi might be deported to and says her detention is unconstitutional and inhumane without a plan of where to send her. Luu-Ng has filed a petition in federal court arguing for Yi to be released from detention. Federal officials have not yet responded in court.

”I think this case asks a very simple question,” Luu-Ng said. “Can the government jail someone when it has no real plan to deport them?

“The Constitution says no."

ICE has not responded to LAist’s request for comment on this story.

Escaping violence

Sithea San, Yi’s sister, remembers the day her family was forced to leave their home.

According to her recollection, the Khmer Rouge approached them at gunpoint April 17, 1975, saying they had to leave before American forces were expected to bomb their city, Phnom Penh.

The Khmer Rouge was a Communist regime that brutally tortured, murdered and starved more than a million Cambodians in the 1970s. A United Nations-assisted tribunal began investigations in 2007 and found surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The family left that day thinking they would be gone for only three days. Their horrific experience would last years, until they arrived in the U.S. as refugees in 1981.

Sithea San recounted how Yi, the eldest sister who was just 9 years old when they left their home, used to steal food to keep her family alive in Cambodia.

After getting caught stealing by the Khmer Rouge several times, San said her sister was given a final warning: If she got caught again they would kill her entire family. They led Yi to a place where they said she, her mother and two sisters would all be buried.

Yi was subjected to forced labor and torture at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, which she later described to Luu-Ng in 2016 as she fought in immigration court to be allowed to stay in the U.S.

Yi still carries scars from where guards would burn her with cigarettes, Luu-Ng told LAist. She said Yi has other scars that lie deeper.

Safe from the Khmer Rouge, troubles continue in the US

San said her family came to the U.S. in 1981, sponsored by her uncle. They arrived in California with just $10.

Yi’s mother and sisters had all become U.S. citizens by 1990, San told LAist, but Yi’s path to legal residency was more complicated.

San said their family did not understand it at the time, but Yi suffered from PTSD. She began to have seizures after they escaped Cambodia, which often prevented her from going to school once they arrived in the U.S.

Yi was also bullied at school, leading her to drop out, her sister said.

Far from Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge, she again became a victim of abuse. Yi fell into a cycle of domestic violence, Luu-Ng told LAist, and she was severely abused by multiple partners over the years.

In 2011, Yi was convicted on drug charges and sentenced to probation. The abuse she faced at home continued and after being so severely beaten by her partner that she could not walk, Luu-Ng said, Yi missed one of her probation appointments.

She said that probation violation led to about a year in state prison, and from there Yi was transferred to ICE custody for removal proceedings.

Protections for victims of torture

Luu-Ng began working under a United Nations grant to help survivors of torture in immigration proceedings in 2009, and first met Yi in 2013.

She had talked with survivors of torture camps in Germany, Poland, Afghanistan and many other countries, but the story of what Yi and her family went through still left her shocked.

“ I've spoken to a lot of survivors of torture,” Luu-Ng told LAist. “Sithy’s story impacted me very, very deeply.”

Luu-Ng took on her case and argued in immigration court that Yi fell under protections granted by the United Nations Convention Against Torture — commonly known as CAT — banning anyone from being deported to countries where they will most likely be tortured.

The judge presiding over a 2016 hearing agreed.

“ We literally walked out of court within 30 minutes,” Luu-Ng said, “even the government counsel acknowledged the grave humanitarian concerns with this case.”

LAist reached out to ICE and an attorney who represented the agency, but they did not comment on the case.

Luu-Ng said Yi is not eligible for asylum status because of her conviction, but she has never heard of anyone being deported after receiving CAT protection.

“ Individuals who receive CAT withholding typically are allowed to live out the rest of their lives in the United States with a work permit,” she told LAist.

Even so, Luu-Ng said Yi also applied for a U visa in 2022 to further protect her from being deported. U visas are intended to give temporary immigration status to crime victims who have cooperated with law enforcement. Luu-Ng said Yi did cooperate with law enforcement in a case against one of her abusers and should qualify for a U visa, but she said they can take eight to ten years to be granted in some cases. She is still waiting for a decision on whether Yi’s visa will be approved.

A mother and her three daughters stand in front of four red leather chairs and microphones.

A policy change puts Yi’s future at risk

The Immigration Center for Women and Children (ICWC) and other immigrant rights organizations sued the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, in October of last year over new immigration enforcement policies on how immigration agents treat victims of abuse or human trafficking.

The group claims in court documents that the new policy “has allowed, for the first time in decades, the detention and removal of survivors of these violent crimes as a routine matter, without regard for the many protections Congress put in place for them.”

Erika Cervantes, a staff attorney for The Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, is part of the legal team representing ICWC in the case. She told LAist that until early 2025 there was a presumption that victims who came forward to help law enforcement would be protected.

She said that U visas and T visas — another type of visa for victims of human trafficking — have strengthened law enforcement by allowing victims to be comfortable coming forward and telling police about their abuse without risk of being deported.

Then, in January, President Trump issued an executive order calling for the “total and efficient” enforcement of immigration laws. ICE shortly followed with a memo that removed previous requirements for agents to identify whether their targets are victims of crimes that might qualify them for protections against deportation.

Cervantes said the memo also cuts protections that had been in place for victims who are waiting for their U and T visas to be approved. Attorneys for ICE previously had been instructed to not seek deportation of U and T visa applicants unless there were “exceptional or exigent circumstances,” according to the new ICE memo, but Cervantes said the new memo removes the presumption that victims would be protected.

“ [The memo] essentially green lights targeting this vulnerable community who went out of their way to share their story, go through this visa process,” Cervantes said. “There’s an about face, and now they’re being put behind bars.”

Cervantes said the ICE memo has affected hundreds of people, and ICWC is asking a federal judge to set aside the policy changes.

“ We're trying to challenge the administration's attempt to criminalize victims,” she told LAist.

Detained by ICE

Yi’s detention on Jan. 8 came as a complete surprise.

According to her sister, Sithea San, she had helped the government when she came forward as a victim and always went to her monthly check-ins with ICE.

“ She complied with every single thing that the government asked her to do,” San told LAist.

In November, two months before her detention, Luu-Ng and San went with Yi for her check-in with ICE. Luu-Ng said they were concerned at that time that Yi could be detained because they saw reports of other people being taken from their families during check-ins.

After discussing Yi’s case with Luu-Ng, the immigration officials at the Santa Ana facility said she would need to start wearing an ankle monitor, but she was free to go home. Luu-Ng recalled one official telling her that as long as Yi didn’t tamper with the ankle monitor or violate any conditions of her electronic monitoring, ICE would not detain her.

“We went out and everyone was in tears, relieved,” Luu-Ng said.

Yi continued to check in, and Luu-Ng thought she would be fine because she was following ICE’s instructions. The next two months Yi went to her check-ins without a lawyer, but her sister still came along.

At her January check-in, San said they saw people crying in the waiting area. She said Yi approached them and tried to comfort them.

Then after waiting about an hour, ICE called Yi into a back room, alone.

Yi can’t read in English, San said, and sometimes she struggles to understand when people talk to her. San wanted to accompany her sister to be sure she understood any questions she might be asked.

Instead, she was stopped at the door.

“ And then I heard the sound . . . the handcuffs,” San said. “And that moment I feel like, am I dreaming? Is this real?”

San said she told the ICE agents that her sister had CAT protections and a pending U visa application, which she showed them. She said they told her it didn’t matter.

When San was later able to visit her sister in detention, she said Yi told her the ICE agents tried to coerce her to sign legal documents she couldn’t understand and threatened that things would get worse for her if she refused.

She said Yi didn’t sign the documents.

“So unfair”

Yi would not be in this situation under any other administration, said Mariko Khan, who is on the board of the nonprofit organization Cambodia Town, where she met Yi about 15 years ago.

“ Things would've been taken care of years ago and she certainly would not have had to be corralled at her check-in,” Khan said. “I mean, that's so unfair.”

Khan said Yi has been a consistent volunteer with Cambodia Town, which serves the largest Cambodian community outside Cambodia itself.

Khan had heard about some of Yi’s background over the years, and she learned that Yi had first found counseling when she was in prison. Having a background as a mental health professional, Khan said she was amazed to see Yi’s improvement.

“ I think it shows a lot of character and integrity that she could, given all that she had suffered, actually get better,” Khan said.

Yi has also been a mainstay with the Cambodia Town Parade. Khan said Yi had led a group of up to 30 women in the parade’s “Stop the Hate” event for the past three years.

Sithea San said Yi planned on coming to her house on Jan. 8 to work on the choreography for this year’s parade after they went to check in with ICE.

Fear in local communities

Manju Kulkarni is the executive director of AAPI Equity Alliance, and she says people being detained by masked agents in the streets and others being held at their immigration appointments reminds some in Southeast Asian communities of the governments their families once fled.

Federal agents have repeatedly detained people at scheduled immigration check-ins over recent months, including Eaton Fire survivor Masuma Khan, 60-year San Diego resident Kazem Majd and dozens of others across California.

“ Communities that are made up often of refugees who escaped an American war in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam . . . are faced with the familiar terror,” Kulkarni told LAist. “Terror from which they thought they had escaped.”

Kulkarni and Luu-Ng told LAist they are deeply concerned that if Yi is deported to a third-country, she will then be sent by that country back to Cambodia despite an immigration judge already acknowledging she would most likely be tortured.

Reuters found that 22 people who were deported to Ghana as a third-country were then sent to their country of origin last year, despite court orders in the U.S meant to prevent that from happening.

For now, Luu-Ng is focused on getting Yi out of detention.

When San visited her sister at the Adelanto detention center on Jan. 18, Yi said she’d just had a nightmare, with scenes from her time under the oppression of the Khmer Rouge.

She told San being detained reminds her of those times, and she tries to keep her mind on other things.

“Remember during the Khmer Rouge,” San told Yi. “You know what we do. We need to have hope.”

Yi told her sister she had been trying to fill her time by teaching the other detainees how to do traditional Cambodian dances.

“How do you do it? How do you get the music?” San recalled asking Yi.

“She said she just sings.”

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