Sununu comes to defense of Indonesian community

Since he became governor, Chris Sununu has rarely clashed with President Donald Trump, supporting the travel ban on citizens from several mostly Muslim nations and quick to play up visits he has made the White House.

But when Trump’s immigration crackdown reached the state’s tiny Indonesian community this year, Sununu wrote a letter to his fellow Republican in October in which he said he was “respectfully requesting your administration reconsider its decision to deport these individuals” and urging it consider a “resolution that would allow them to remain in the United States.”

Sununu insisted the case of the Indonesians was different from that of visitors from the Middle East or Syrian refugees hoping to settle in New Hampshire. The Indonesians had been in the state for decades, raising families, working and staying out of trouble, he argues.

“This really isn’t an issue of illegal immigration in the traditional sense. That is often what we hear from the Trump administration, and that is an issue that has to be dealt on the national scale,” Sununu told The Associated Press in an interview. “What you have here is a unique situation.”

Sununu has been praised by Democrats in New Hampshire who have championed the Indonesians’ case while Republicans, and even anti-immigrant Trump supporters, have said little about the decision.

The nearly 70 Indonesians in New Hampshire and Massachusetts are mostly Christians and fled religious persecution before and after the fall of former dictator Suharto in 1998. In the chaos that followed, riots broke out and mobs targeted ethnic Chinese and other minorities in the mostly Muslim country.

Many of the Indonesians came to seacoast communities in New Hampshire, where they found jobs and raised families. But in past six months, as part of a wider crackdown on immigration since Trump took office, they have been told they had to prepare to leave the country.