Divided Families Podcast

In this episode, Paul speaks with Oleksandr Shyn, founder of Ukrainian Voices, which works on raising awareness and building solidarity in Taiwan about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which has separated countless families such as Olek's. A fourth-generation descendant of Soviet Koreans who were deported by Stalin to Central Asia, Olek also discusses his family history and the stories of Korean dias...

This episode was recorded at the very beginning of creating this podcast, all the way back in January 2020, right before the pandemic. We had the opportunity to ground our podcast in its roots by speaking with Dr. Jason Ahn, who conceived of the Divided Families Film and helped start Divided Families USA. Listen to Eugene's conversation with Jason to learn about what inspired him to advocate on be...

In this episode, Eugene speaks with Professor Ndjuoh MehChu, an Associate Professor of Law at Seton Hall Law, about his article, "Help Me to Find My Children: A Thirteenth Amendment Challenge to Family Separation," published in the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties. Eugene's recent student Note titled "Recognizing the Right to Family Unity in Immigration Law" can be found here: ht...

In this episode, Katherine speaks with Tatiana Kim, who grew up on the island of Sakhalin in Russia. Sakhalin, which is just north of Japan and east of mainland Russia, has been the subject of (and subjected to) several international conflicts. Tatiana describes the mix of Korean, Russian, and Japanese culture and language that makes it unique and results from a history of forced migration and gov...

Sera Koulabdara is the Executive Director of Legacies of War. In this episode, Eugene sits down with Sera in the beginning of a three part series with Legacies of War to provide some background on the Laos bombings conducted during the American "Secret War" on Laos and how it resulted in family separation, both for Sera's family and others. Today, bombs remain in Laos in the form of unexploded ord...

Kham Moua is the Director of National Policy at Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC), and in today's episode, he chats with Mai Tong Yang about about the swinging impact of American immigration policies on families who moved from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam to the U.S. in the latter part of the 1900's, many of whom arrived as refugees. To this day, numerous Asian Americans have been forc...

"In Northern Ireland terms, denomination dictates identity." In this episode, Paul speaks with Paul McLaughlin, Director of Development at Northern Ireland Mixed Marriage Association, about the long history of mixed marriages in Northern Ireland. In Northern Ireland one in five marriages are mixed, but inter-church relationships are still regarded with suspicion and considered a betrayal against o...

In this episode, Eugene and Paul look back on the Divided Families Podcast, two years later. The two also reflect on 2021, the current status of the Divided Families Podcast, and plans for producing Season 3 in 2022. Thank you so much to everyone who donated so far to our fundraiser, and we would appreciate any additional support for as long as our fundraiser is live: https://www.gofundme.com/f/su...

Halfway through his ten-year ban from the United States, Adam Crapser has been thrust into public attention again with the release of Justin Chon's movie "Blue Bayou." The film has striking similarities to Adam's own life story, blasphemed as a heartfelt tragedy of Adam's personal trauma. In this episode, Adam sits down with DFP team member Mailé to talk about Adam's story of family separation and...

"Kill the Indian, save the man" was a mantra propagated by General Richard H. Pratt, who famously established a model for Native Residential Schools that tore Native children away from their families and cultures. Brayden Sonny White is Kanien'kehá:ka from the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory, and member of the Bear Clan. He is an advocate for suicide prevention and mental health resources for Native yo...

Liberty in North Korea, or LiNK, is a nonprofit that primarily works to help North Korean refugees hiding in China resettle in South Korea or the United States. The organization has many high school and college chapters, and seeks to raise awareness about human rights through North Korean issues. In this episode, Paul, a former member of LiNK himself, speaks with Hannah Song, President and CEO of...

In this episode, Paul speaks with Tereza Lee, a pianist, activist, and original Dreamer. Tereza tells the story of how she was born in Brazil to South Korean immigrants but later moved to Chicago, where she was undocumented. The two talk about how not only Tereza's life, but those of many others changed when her music teacher reached out to Senator Richard Durbin to see if anything could be done a...

In this episode, Eugene interviews Rachelle Barbour, an assistant federal defender for the Office of the Federal Defender of the Eastern District of California. She is an advocate for Omar Ameen, an Iraqi refugee accused of being an ISIS commander and murdering a police officer in Iraq. On April 21, 2021, a federal judge ruled this was physically impossible because Ameen was not in Iraq at the tim...

Ioanida Costache is an ethnomusicology PhD student at Stanford University who is Romani-American and activist. In this episode, Eugene speaks with Ioanida, a friend from college, about Romani-American identity, the erasure of the Roma as victims of the Holocaust, and the continued separation of Roma families in modern day America. For updates, follow us on Instagram at @DividedFamiliesPodcast, and...

The Trust for Social Achievement is an organization based in Bulgaria dedicated to helping people reach their full potential. Its staff particularly focus on aiding the Roma community, of which 72% live below the poverty line. In this episode, Eugene speaks with Maria Metodieva, the Institutional Development Officer, and Ognyan Isaev, the Educational Achievement Official, about who the Roma people...

Hollis Gentry is a genealogy specialist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture Library. Following DeNeen Brown's overview of family separation and slavery in our previous episode, Hollis shares her personal quest to reconnect her family through genealogical research. For information on the Museum of African American History & Culture Library, see here: https://n...

Professor DeNeen Brown is an award-winning journalist for The Washington Post and an associate professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. In this episode, Paul and Professor Brown discuss the legacy of American slavery and family separation, and in particular, the way generational trauma connects the past to today. Watch the trailer for Rise Again: Tulsa a...

Thanhha Lai is Vietnam-born American author perhaps best known for her debut novel, "Inside Out and Back Again," which won the Newbery Honor and the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. In this upbeat episode, Eugene and Thanhha talk about her young adult novel, "Butterfly Yellow," and how we should allow complexity in telling the stories of refugees. Transcript: https://dividedfamil...

Nicole Chung is a writer, the Editor-In-Chief of Catapult Magazine, and a Korean transracial adoptee, raised by a white family in Oregon. In her bestselling memoir, All You Can Ever Know, Nicole describes the process of searching for her Korean birth parents, which happened in tandem with the birth of her own child. In confronting her childhood and reevaluating the messages around adoption she had...

In this episode Eugene catches up with Tyler Rivera, a close friend who had recently returned from a five month fellowship conducting research regarding climate change in the Marshall Islands. Like many other island states, the Marshall Islands are at the frontlines of dealing with the consequences of rising sea levels. Listen to learn more about what it means to preserve your culture when the con...

Halmurat Uyghur is a Uyghur activist and physician based in Finland. In 2017, after his parents were sent to one of the Chinese government's "re-education camps" in Xinjiang, he began to campaign for Uyghur rights and was among the first to stand up and openly talk about his parents’ arbitrary detention. Halmurat has used social media to promote his cause through hashtag campaigns like #MeTooUyghu...

Hanna Burdorf is a PhD candidate in Uyghur studies at Newcastle University. She has worked on the Xinjiang Victims Database, which aims to document ethnic-minority (namely Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Hui) who have been held at camps in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. In this episode, Eugene asks Hanna about the general situation in Xinjiang and her experiences working on the issue in-pe...

Miki Dezaki is a recent graduate of the Graduate Program in Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo. He is also known as "Medamasensei" on Youtube, where he has made comedy videos and videos on social issues in Japan. In this episode, Paul speaks with Miki about Shusenjo, his directorial debut, and how the issue of comfort women is seen by different groups in Korea, Japan, and the US. He also...

In this episode, Eugene sits down with freelance journalist Chris Outcalt, who published a piece in The Atlantic in August 2020 titled "When a Family Separation Becomes Permanent." The article can be found here: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/08/ice-family-separation-death/614335/ Eugene asks Chris about his process of writing the piece, which details the story of Idrissa Camara...

Walla Elsheikh is the co-founder and CEO of Birthright AFRICA, which is committed to providing a free educational trip to Africa for all youth and young adults of African descent in the US. She was born in Sudan and raised there as well as in Sweden and Uganda before immigrating to New York City. In this episode, Eugene speaks with Walla about what inspired her to embark on such an ambitious proje...