MN8

About the Organization:

MN8 fights for the liberation of Southeast Asian communities. We fight to keep families together by ending detention and deportation. We are a political home for Southeast Asians to build collective power, create systemic change, and work towards a shared future where our communities can heal and thrive for generations to come. We believe change is possible when movements are built rooted in love, restoration, and healing.

The Issue:

Over 17,000 Southeast Asians have received final orders of removal since 2002. This means over 17,000 families would be separated and thousands more are living in fear, hopelessness, and heavy surveillance. The failed immigration and refugee resettlement program continues to re-traumatize Southeast Asian communities and puts us in an endless cycle of violence, terror, and family separation. Southeast Asian deportation is rooted within larger systemic issues of carceralism, militarism, and imperialism.

Southeast Asians experience a violent displacement-to-detention-to-deportation pipeline that has deep roots back to harm enacted during the era of wars in Southeast Asia, including re-education camps, mass bombings, and gas poisoning. Over 3 million people were displaced and resettled into underfunded and over-policed neighborhoods, struggling with poverty and violence. In these neighborhoods, the police targeted, profiled, and criminalized community members, leading them to be incarcerated. Even after completing their time and taking steps to restore their lives, the U.S. has continued to weaponize and scale up the state violence machine through ICE. When individuals are detained and deported, they face a cruel double punishment and life sentence of forced family separation, isolation, and displacement. Southeast Asians are often re-traumatized with the same violence enacted on them during the era of wars, leading to lifetimes of trauma and harm.

We have seen more cases since 2016, where many individuals have been silently deported, with no pathways to return. Anti-Asian violence and hate has always existed and targets our communities in ways that isolate and divide us. As Asian Americans, we are often harmed by misleading generalizations about the needs and experiences of Asian Americans. Our narratives of displacement, detention, and deportation are often mis-told and weaponized against us by labeling impacted individuals as criminals, gang-affiliated, and disposable. This dominant narrative of good vs. bad immigrants often leads to the dehumanization of individuals, taking advantage of the incomplete narratives of detention and deportation. Impacted individuals often live their lives in shadows, discouraged from sharing their experiences out of fear. Not only is their freedom taken from them, but so are their stories, voices, and humanity.

The Solution:

As we work to free our Southeast Asian communities, we move with the understanding that the path to liberation must be holistic and address intersectional oppression. Our vision is for sustainable, deep-rooted change that allows Southeast Asian communities to thrive independently with abundant access to resources and support.

MN8 focuses on four core pillars that drive our work:

1) Community Organizing

We lean on powerful community-centered spaces, led by the voices and leadership of those most impacted. We believe movements and solutions must be people-centered and know our collective organizing power is enough to change worlds.
We proactively build our world but also prepare our communities to protect, defend, and take care of one another in times of crisis

2) Advocacy

We dream of ending oppressive systems and imagine new realities without these systems. We give ourselves permission to take principled risks and create solutions outside of the status quo. We want deep-rooted solutions that end the cycles of violence by abolishing oppressive systems.

3) Community Care + Healing

Movement and organizing work includes intentional spaces for healing, wellness, and care. The SEA diaspora has been wracked by a heartbreaking history of war, genocide, family separation, and other forms of violence. The experience of detention and deportation is retraumatizing.
We hold space to celebrate each other’s presence, spend time experiencing unapologetic Southeast Asian joy, and remind each other of our value and worthiness. Existing is enough.
We dream of providing holistic support that is sustainable beyond imaginary borders. We have not forgotten about our beloved community members who have been deported. We fight for their freedom and right to return despite transnational challenges.

4) Power Building

We draw power from intergenerational spaces of connection, healing, and organizing. There’s invaluable wisdom and possibilities across generations. We lean into our roots, into the resilience and dreams of our ancestors. Our movement must be big enough for all of us.
We reclaim our narratives and build spacious platforms where our stories can be shared in care, rawness, and truth. We believe our stories are important and hold healing and transformation power.

Manisha G. Bewtra, AICP

Planning, Mobility, and Development Advisor to Tucson Mayor Regina Romero

Manisha Bewtra, AICP (she/her) is Mayor Romero’s Planning, Mobility, and Development Advisor. In this role, she leverages her passion for planning for thriving, healthy, and inclusive communities with her love for policy-making and politics as the Mayor’s liaison on transportation and land use issues. Manisha is an experienced public process facilitator and project manager and works collaboratively with the Mayor’s team and city departments to apply an equity lens to all city initiatives.
Manisha has built her career on bringing divergent perspectives together, facilitating conversations around change, and generating data-informed solutions that move communities forward. She is driven by public service and champions equitable policies and inclusive community engagement.
Prior to her current role, she worked at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council in Boston as a senior regional planner and the manager of the analytics team, at the Massachusetts Housing Partnership where she was a statewide technical assistance provider, as an adjunct city planning instructor for Master’s degree program courses at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and at Arizona State University, and in municipal government and nonprofit community development organizations in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Chandler, Arizona.
Manisha has served on various equity-focused organizations and committees and is a graduate of Emerge Massachusetts, the Initiative for Diversity in Civic Leadership, and the Massachusetts Commonwealth Seminar, three organizations dedicated to training underrepresented groups to influence public policy and to run for office. She has a Master of City Planning degree from the University of Pennsylvania, a BA in Economics and Art from The University of Iowa, and is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners. She currently serves as a member at large for the American Planning Association Arizona Southern Section and is a member of the executive team for the Asian American and Political Islander Caucus for the Arizona Democratic Party.
Before moving to Tucson in the summer of 2020, she lived in the Boston area for twelve years. During her years in Melrose, Massachusetts, she served as a Human Rights Commissioner and subsequently as a City Councilor. When elected to the Melrose City Council, she became the first person of color ever to serve in elected office in Melrose. She grew up in Iowa and identifies as Desi/Indian-American. She, her husband, and her son felt welcomed and right at home in Tucson when they moved here – even in spite of a pandemic and searing summer heat.

Arnie Saiki

research, writer, program director

Broadly focusing on regional economic and geopolitical themes in the Asia and Pacific regions, Arnie Saiki is currently leading a working group on data, statistics and valuation in the Pacific. His book “Economic and Ecological Accounting: Towards Intemerate Values,” was published last year by the Pacific Conference of Churches, the Pacific Theological College and the University of the South Pacific.

Since the publication, this campaign has been introduced to the Ecological and Economic Justice program at the World Council of Churches and he is participating in a G8 Interfaith forum for the inclusion of Wellbeing indicators into our economic accounts.

While national statistics and ecological accounting normally fall under the purview of government, academic or international institutions, Arnie has been campaigning in democratizing our ecological data, seeking support for a proof-of-concept accounting program that would enable poor, impacted, and indigenous peoples to actively participate in how we account for our socio and economic biodiversity. Intemerate Accounting is an equation that helps to correct accounting disparities that have, to a large extent, excluded the Global South. Revising our accounting system can provide access and opportunities that cross wide campaign sectors, bringing hope, action and efficacy to reverse climate change, restore our ecological biodiversity, and redistribute global wealth more equitably.

Arnie has been actively promoting and working on global justice campaigns since 2007 when he received a “We the People” grant from the Hawai’i Council of the Humanities for his work on Hawai’i Statehood. He has organized conferences with Hawaiian national independence groups, managed the Save Rapanui campaign after the Chilean military forced a lockdown of Easter Islanders. Arnie spoke at the World Bank representing the Pacific Island Forum, and participated in discussions around regionalism in the Pacific. He was recently appointed the US-Pacific Diplomacy and Solidarity Mission for the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), and is on the management team of the Deep Seabed Mining Campaign.

In 2011, Arnie received the blessing from Dr. Kekuni Blaisdell to organize a counter-conference in Honolulu while APEC was there and coordinated the Moana Nui conferences, an international partnership between the International Forum on Globalization and Pua Mohala I Ka Po. For the last ten years he has been campaigning on issues around trade, development, ecological resources, indigenous issues and militarization in the Pacific.

His essays, “TPP at the End of the Line: a briefing on economic cooperation and capacity building” was published in American Quarterly by John Hopkins University Press, and “Manifesting the Liquid Continent,” was published by Yunnan National University, as part of the 1st International conference on Asia and Pacific Ethnology and Anthropology.