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and start your day knowing what matters and why. Hey, good morning. Patricia Murphy here. It's

Saturday. This is Seattle now. Today we're bringing you the best from the KUOW Newsroom. First, Washington State is home to one of the largest communities of Lao refugees in the country. For decades, people from Laos who got a deportation order were able to stay in the U.S.

That's because Laos wouldn't take them back.

Now under pressure from the Trump administration, those deportation flights have picked up.

Gustavo Seggero has more.

About a dozen friends and relatives sit on blankets on a stretch of grass snacking on chips and soda

we're in Tacoma in the mountains up it's a warm may day they've gathered outside the barbed wire fences of the northwest ice processing center

this family is hoping for the release of Kai Sangara and uncle And uncle, dad, and grandfather to this group.

She found a key and she's digging a hole into the detention center right now.

Sangdara is from Raymond, a coastal town in Pacific County.

Sangara's eldest daughter, Melissa Ekapan, says many Lao people move there as refugees of the Vietnam

War.

With the cannery and logging jobs, she said it was a good place to start a new life.

And then being able to like live off the land, whether it's fishing or hunting or clam digging.

So they've been able to do that. And it's not as hectic as the city. So I think it was a little bit easier for them to adopt you. Eka Pan learned a lot these past few weeks about her family.

They hadn't talked about their history like this until now.

Her dad, Zengdara, has a decades-old deportation order that was basically put on hold because Laos refused to take back most deportees.

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