5 Years Later: Remembering March 16th
A Community-Centered Response to Violence against Asian American Communities
On March 16, 2021, eight people, including six Asian women massage workers, were murdered at three spas in the Metro Atlanta area. As we commemorate the five year anniversary of this tragedy – one rooted in misogyny, white supremacy, and gender based violence – we center the victims, survivors, and their loved ones. We are struck that five years later, the animus against immigrants has only grown, and our communities are still not safe.
The Atlanta Spa Shootings took place during a tumultuous time in our history, following a contentious election in 2020 and a shift in Georgia’s representation in the U.S. Senate in 2021. Meanwhile, the right was stoking divisions and fanning the flames for white nationalist violence, resulting in an insurrection on January 6, 2021. Asian Americans were afraid to leave their homes because of the physical attacks targeting especially elders and young women. These assaults were spurred on by the right when they scapegoated our communities for the COVID-19 pandemic. Over time, the reality for immigrant women has become one in which they face increased state violence and gender based violence while their legal protections and rights become more and more limited.
Five years since the shootings, our communities in Georgia continue to collectively grieve. Today, immigrants are facing the same brutality, a result of hateful anti-immigrant and xenophobic rhetoric spewed by elected officials and violence delivered at the hands of government agents. In 2021, the Trump administration was blaming Chinese American and Asian American communities for the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, the administration is indiscriminately scapegoating immigrants writ large. Their decisions are fracturing our country instead of laying blame where it belongs: the Trump administration’s support of rising white supremacy and white nationalist violence.
Anti-immigrant hate isn’t confined to shootings by white supremacists as private citizens. Anti-immigrant hate motivates the targeted and deadly operations carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a rogue paramilitary force backed by the federal government. Immigrants are detained in cruel, inhumane conditions where they are refused sufficient food, clean water, and medical care. ICE agents hurl racist slurs at children, cage sick people in cramped and filthy detention centers, and sexually abuse immigrant women.
When ICE raids targeted families in our neighborhoods – in Chamblee, in Tucker, and along the Buford Highway corridor shaping Atlanta's cultural legacy – our communities didn't retreat. We organized. Community members packed our “Know Your Rights” (KYR) sessions. We showed up for each other and we saw true solidarity in practice. Yet, the fight is ongoing, including for the victims whose case is being heard in Fulton County. As families still pursue justice for their loved ones murdered in the Atlanta Spa Shootings, labor exploitation continues in Georgia. We see it at car manufacturing factories like the Hyundai Metaplant, we see it in the agricultural fields, and we see it at food processing plants across our state. Many of us had not considered gender based violence against immigrant communities until the Atlanta Spa Shootings, but when victims seek justice, they seek justice for all those facing gender based violence, labor exploitation, xenophobia, racism, and patriarchy.
We are grateful for the ongoing support and solidarity from our local and national communities whose care has bolstered us the past five years, and continues to hold us as we face growing state violence today. In spite of years of anti-immigrant and anti-Asian rhetoric that led to violence against our communities, we have demonstrated resilience and unity through the forms of community gatherings and days of remembrance to mourn, heal, and deepen our collective care for one another. While the government continues to weaponize hate speech, pass legislation to further surveil immigrants, and suppress our voting rights and political power in order to eliminate us, we call on our communities to fight on, organize, and show up for one another. As our communities persist and survive under these targeted assaults, our collective responsibility to each other is to not turn away or become numb; remembrance is an act of resistance.
In solidarity,
Murtaza Khwaja, Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta
Phi Nguyen, Former Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta
Stephanie Cho, Former Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta
Georgia Organizations
Asian American Advocacy Fund
Asian American Voices for Education
Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI)
CAIR-Georgia
Friends of Shelly Abraham
GALEO Impact Fund
Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR)
Georgia AAPI Hub Georgia Muslim Voter Project
Indivisible Georgia Coalition
Onyx Impact
Raksha, Inc
Reproductive Freedom for All formerly NARAL
South Asian Bar Association of Georgia
Taiwanese American Professionals - Atlanta
Women Engaged
National/ Out of the State Organizations
AAPI NJ
Apna Ghar,Inc.
Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California
Asian American Arts Alliance
Asian American Resource Workshop (AARW)
Asian Counseling and Referral Service
Asian Law AllianceAsian Media Access
Asian Pacific Islanders Civic Action Network
Asian/Pacific Islander Domestic Violence Resource Project
Asian Women Giving Circle
Campaign for a New Myanmar
CASA
Chinese Progressive Association, Boston
Fayetteville Police Accountability Community Taskforce
International Campaign for the Rohingya
Japanese American Citizens League, Twin Cities Chapter
Japanese American National Museum
Let's Get Free: The Women & Trans Prisoner Defense Committee
NM Asian Family Center
OCA Greater Tucson
Pork Filled Productions
Sakhi for South Asian Survivors
Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF)
South Asian Network
Southeast Immigrant Rights Network
The SEAD Project
The Sikh Coalition
The Ocean Project
United Women in Faith
Vietnamese American Initiative for Development (VietAID)
Vietnamese Association of Illinois
Visual Communications Media
Welcoming America