US Justice Department vows to investigate surging cases of anti-Asian violence

WASHINGTON - Senior officials of the US Justice Department said Friday that the recent surge in violence and hate incidents against Asian Americans in the country is unacceptable, vowing to investigate those cases and other hate crimes.

These "horrific attacks on Asian Americans across the country" have "no place in our society," Deputy Attorney General John Carlin told a news briefing on domestic terrorism, adding that the Justice Department is "committed to putting a stop to it."

Carlin said agents and prosecutors at the department will "look at recent footage from New York and California to see those horrific attacks directed at Asian Americans, to realize how dire the threats are."

One of the high-profile examples of innocent Asian Americans being insulted during the COVID-19 pandemic involved a woman waiting in line at a bakery in New York, who was shoved into a metal newspaper box by a man, and a 91-year-old man being shoved to the ground in the Chinatown in Oakland, California.

In yet another heinous crime, Vicha Ratanapakdee, a Thai American aged 84, was fatally attacked in San Francisco on Jan 31. The suspect, 19-year-old Antoine Watson, has been arrested on suspicion of murder, elder abuse and assault with a deadly weapon.

"While the rise of domestic violent extremism is a serious and growing public safety and national security threat, unfortunately violence motivated by extremism, hate, intolerance, and racism has been a persistent and tragic occurrence throughout American history," Carlin said, adding the department will commit itself to three specific pillars in dealing with the problem, "following the data and intelligence, protecting civil liberties and taking an all tools approach."

Pamela Karlan, principal deputy assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, said in a statement earlier in the day that the United States "is currently facing unprecedented challenges, some of which are fueling increased bigotry and hatred."

She said the Civil Rights Division is working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, federal prosecutors and local law enforcers to "evaluate possible hate crimes."

Stop AAPI Hate, a group tracking discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI), said it had received more than 2,808 firsthand accounts of anti-Asian hate from mid-March 2020 through the end of 2020. Physical assaults made up 8.7 percent of those incidents while 70.9 percent involved verbal harassment, the group said.

Outraged by the anti-Asian violence, members of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (CAPAC) -- a bipartisan, bicameral group in Congress -- recently called for Congress to pass the No Hate Act, which has been stalled since its introduction in 2019.

CAPAC Chairperson Judy Chu, a California Democrat, said last week that the Asian American community had "reached a crisis point that cannot be ignored," laying the blame on former President Donald Trump and Republicans' stigmatization of Asian Americans by insistently referring to the coronavirus as the "Wuhan virus" "China plague" or "Kung Flu."