In the News

As California heads into what some are predicting to be a close Democratic primary, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community organizations in the Golden State have been busy pushing AAPI voters to head to the polls on Tuesday. One group is also planning to visit voting sites in central California to ensure language assistance is available to voters with limited English proficiency.

In a small downtown Los Angeles office one May evening, Helen Xiang and her teenage son Sam sat side by side, calling a list of Chinese-American registered voters. 

Sam spoke in English and his mother in Mandarin, but their message was the same: get to the polls June 7 and vote in the state primary.

“We have to encourage our people to speak out," said Xiang, a 52-year-old Alhambra resident. "Your ballot is really important.”

LOS ANGELES – After 30 years of defending civil rights, Asian Americans Advancing Justice launched a Tagalog helpline to extend their reach of legal services to the Filipino community in Los Angeles.

"We think this Tagalog legal help will help open up services and provide better opportunities so people can get jobs. We know that Filipino-Americans want to be U.S. citizens. There's a relatively good naturalization rate," said executive director of AAAJ LA Stewart Kwoh.

The complaint, drafted by the Asian American Coalition for Education, accuses the three Ivy League schools of denying admission to Asian-American students with near-perfect SAT scores and GPAs in the top one percent while accepting applicants of other races with similar accolades. The groups also allege that racial quotas and caps are used to maintain "ideal racial balances" that have kept the percentage of Asian-American students at these schools unchanged over the last two decades.