President’s FY 2020 Budget an Affront to Working Vietnamese Families

March 25, 2019

PIVOT decries the White House’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2020, released on March 11, 2019. The budget runs completely counter to our values and policy priorities, and is harmful for Vietnamese Americans nationwide.

The proposed budget would slash funding for mandatory programs,including a cut of $1.4 trillion to Medicaid over a 10-year period, $220 billion to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), $70 billion to Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and $21 billion to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Millions of Americans, including thousands of Vietnamese working families, utilize these programs to build economic opportunity for themselves and their children.

In addition to cutting funding to critical programs that support working families, the budget would invest billions of dollars to further the Administration’s sweeping anti-immigrant agenda by allocating  $8.6 billion to a border wall and increasing immigration detention funds by $2.7 billion. Immigration detention in the United States is already currently at an all-time high with over 50,000 allegedly undocumented immigrants locked up in for-profit detention prisons across the country. At the same time, thousands of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian refugees who have lived in the U.S. for decades and call the U.S. their home are in danger of being expelled and forcibly returned to the countries from which they fled.

PIVOT soundly rejects this budget as a blueprint for our country. We are committed to continuing  to speak out against this budget and all other policies that harm the Vietnamese-American and other immigrant and refugee communities.