More than a year ago, federal cuts to health-related grants threw into uncertainty Mississippi’s only advocacy group devoted to serving the needs of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders statewide, and they are still figuring out how to recover.
In Biloxi, a five-person staff at the nonprofit Boat People SOS helps primarily Vietnamese residents with interpretation and translation, including for medical appointments. With over 4,000 Mississippi Vietnamese on the Gulf Coast, the team said their small size makes it hard to keep up with the community’s needs. Losing nearly $500,000 in federal funds made meeting those needs that much more difficult.
“Overnight, we lost the ability to sustain these positions and the vital support they provided to some of the most underserved families on the Gulf Coast,” said Jane Nguyen, executive director of the branch with offices in Biloxi and Bayou La Batre, Alabama.
Following efforts by the Trump administration to terminate federal grants, President Donald Trump signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act a year ago. Together, these efforts have resulted in widespread cuts to health funding nationwide that will be felt for years to come, including at the local level.
On the Mississippi Gulf Coast, community health workers are trained to perform medical interpretation training while also managing their clients’ full cases. They schedule doctor appointments, arrange transportation and show up at appointments to interpret in-person. But with limited staff, health worker Lien Nguyen says she can get behind on appointments.
“Sometimes, we have to turn some people down,” she said.
On any given day at the office, Lien Nguyen might split her time between preparing for a Boat People SOS event like its back-to-school fundraiser, handling a domestic violence case or even going through someone’s mail to see what’s important and what can be thrown away. One colleague spends most of his time on immigration questions, and another goes to court hearings and medical visits. As a team, they are often the first call someone in the community makes when they need help with language access across a wide range of issues.
Beyond this year, Jane Nguyen said she doesn’t know how this vital work will be funded.
A major grant came through the former state Office of Preventive Health and Health Equity. That office was later downsized and folded into a different group last year, partially in response to Mississippi State Auditor Shad White’s report of mismanaged funds. Nguyen was forced to rapidly find additional grants or private funding to cover the shortfall. After several months of uncertainty, her efforts and support from the national W.K. Kellogg Foundation allowed the Biloxi office to maintain its staff, while one of the three workers in the Bayou La Batre office went down to part time.
The most recent cuts come after the program has already shrunk. For three years, the Biloxi staff were supplemented by two rotating Americorps workers who assisted on the administrative side. But in April 2025, the Trump administration cut Americorps funding.
“We’re in a huge transition period now,” Nguyen said. “Very small office but a lot to do, so we have been struggling with capacity.”
With fewer staff members, it takes longer for patients to get seen, health workers said. When they schedule a patient’s appointment, they commit to being present the full length of time, including unpredictable waiting times and the appointment itself. Tai Nguyen, another community health worker with no relation to Jane or Lien, said he can be booked for as many as 15 interpretation cases a week, the majority of which are health-related.
Tai Nguyen said he doesn’t know if his position will be funded for next year. If not, he’ll go back to working in the real estate business full time, but he’ll have to leave behind a roster of clients who have come to rely on him and the other staff members.
Many of their clients don’t have family or friends nearby who have time to handle tasks like going through mail or setting up appointments, Nguyen said.
This is true for one long-time client of the Biloxi office, 73-year-old Thieu Ngo. A Medicare agent recommended he see Boat People SOS for help getting settled in Mississippi shortly after he moved to the Gulf Coast roughly two decades ago.
Ngo, a retired construction and home repair worker, only knows a few phrases in English. He doesn’t have family in Mississippi, and most of the friends he knew here have since moved away. Ngo credits community health workers with helping him apply for Medicare and handling his medical visits, including family doctors and specialists like his lung and heart doctors.
He prefers to have an in-person interpreter, Ngo said in Vietnamese. When he’s at the hospital without one, providers will turn to a virtual interpreter, but that is not effective for him.
“The hospital let me hear the machine,” he said. “I hear it, I don’t understand anything.”
Confronting challenges and meeting needs
The Gulf Coast is home to the largest concentration of Vietnamese individuals in Mississippi. Many families trace their roots to the first waves of refugees who came to the United States in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, drawn to the region’s thriving seafood industry. Families stayed and expanded, some working in a shrimping business that has since struggled to compete with international exports, and others shifting to the casino industry or to open restaurants and bakeries.
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina tore up the Coast, leveled homes and destroyed the boats many families depended on to maintain their livelihood. Five years later, the BP oil spill hit a community that was still rebuilding. Fishing closures related to the spill resulted in a 60% decrease in shrimp catch in 2010, a Natural Resources Defense Council report said.
In the wake of the hurricane, national organizations like Boat People SOS set up temporary offices to provide direct aid, and then stayed as challenges compounded. At the time, no organizations helped the Vietnamese-speaking community navigate insurance claims, post-disaster unemployment or interpretation in general.
“We came down here during Hurricane Katrina to help the recovery efforts, and ended up finding a huge population of Vietnamese along the Coast and no resources available to them,” Jane Nguyen said. In 2025, that “temporary” office celebrated its 20th anniversary.
Boat People SOS works with a variety of partners within the local area and throughout the state, including local churches and a few Vietnamese-speaking healthcare providers.
They often refer residents who speak primarily in Vietnamese to places like the Singing River Health System’s Biloxi clinic for primary care. Nurse practitioner Cynthia Le has worked at Singing River for over 20 years and is now at the Biloxi clinic, while Dr. Andy Doan joined last year. For pediatric care, they may refer people to the Coastal Family Health Center, a Gulf Coast federally qualified health center that operates on a sliding fee scale, charging patients based on their ability to pay.
Angelica Trieu is a pediatric nurse practitioner at Coastal Family Health, working down the street from the hospital where she was born. She often sees Vietnamese patients who recently immigrated to the area.
To communicate with patients who may feel uncomfortable speaking in English, Trieu’s clinic relies on BoostLingo, a service that offers virtual medical interpretation. That platform allows providers to call a language interpreter via tablet or smartphone and choose between a phone or video call. Along with LanguageLine Solutions, used by the Singing River Health System and Ochsner Health, BoostLingo is one of several interpretation services available globally.
Trieu has heard from some clients that the virtual interpreter’s speech is hard to understand. Other times, connection issues and glitches in the software interrupt important conversations between patients and providers.
One Chinese patient who communicated with Trieu through BoostLingo told her after the consultation that she understood Trieu’s English better than the interpreter’s Chinese. With her Vietnamese patients, Trieu speaks to them directly.
“A lot of my other patients that have utilized [BoostLingo] with an in-person translator would say the tablet just doesn’t make sense,” she said. For Trieu, it seemed like the quality of interpretation varied between calls.
BoostLingo Director of Quality and Compliance Rocío Treviño acknowledged the difficulties of maintaining a large bank of virtual interpreters while outlining its standards. Every medical interpreter has to have three years of experience in medical interpretation in addition to the standard certifications, she said.
Sometimes, parents ask their children to help them understand what is said during their appointment. With patients who speak Spanish, Chinese or another language, Trieu tries not to rely on children to translate, no matter how old they are.
As someone who interpreted for her parents in high school, she remembers what it’s like to not know medical terms and doesn’t want misinterpretations to affect her patients. Trieu said she has seen other providers in the clinic use non-medical translation apps, like Google Translate, but that she avoids doing so because she has seen how inaccurate those services can be.
“I like to treat my patients how I would want my family to be treated,” she said.
Some researchers have found that apps, while convenient, can be worse than having no translation at all. Iris Feinberg is a health literacy and language access researcher at Georgia State University. Her team has conducted research on how the Google Translate app compares to a trained interpreter in clinical conversations, including for Vietnamese patients. Data showed that Google Translate was nearly seven times more likely to make errors than the human interpreter in those settings.
Across the 14 conversations sampled, the interpreter was better at conveying not just what the doctor said but also the clinical significance of the words, Feinberg said. Meanwhile, Google Translate incorrectly translated messages that could create a real problem for someone’s health.
“The doctor could be saying something that could happen to you if you don’t take your medicine at night. And then it could be translated as ‘don’t take your medicine at night,’” she said.
Barriers beyond language
Outside of interpretation, one of the biggest challenges in getting patients to the doctor is transportation, several advocates and people who work in healthcare told Mississippi Today. While there is a public bus system through Gulf Coast Transit, coverage of rural areas is limited. Even in the Gulfport-Biloxi metro area, some buses only run once every two hours.
The majority of Boat People SOS’s clients are on Medicaid or Medicare, said Tai Nguyen. Medicare offers patients a certain number of non-emergency rides a year, which can range from 12 to unlimited, depending on the patient’s plan. The service is free but can be slow, and drivers often don’t speak Vietnamese, which can lead to communication barriers when they pick up the patient.
Some patients, like Ngo, avoid using the service because they can’t speak with the driver. He has his own car, but after some procedures, he’s not allowed to drive home alone. In these cases, he’ll order a taxi instead because all he needs to do is give the driver an address, he said.
The Boat People SOS office policy is to not provide rides and instead meet patients at the hospital or clinic due to liability concerns if there is an accident. Tai Nguyen schedules a patient’s ride three days in advance through a transportation broker and interprets if the driver runs into any issues the day of.
Rules matter, but Tai Nguyen has made an exception for a patient who had no one else to turn to. The patient had run out of Medicare-covered rides but urgently needed to see his eye doctor. He had also just gotten in an accident and didn’t have a vehicle to drive, so he called Nguyen’s cellphone.
“If I wasn’t there, he would have just missed that appointment, not knowing what can happen to his vision,” Nguyen said.
Health worker Lien Nguyen also has made an exception to drive a patient. The ride was scheduled for two hours before the transportation service started operation at 7 a.m., and the broker canceled it without informing the patient. When the doctors called Nguyen from the Pascagoula hospital 30 minutes away, she realized her patient wasn’t going to make it to his appointment unless she got him there.
“I took it upon myself, just went to his house, pick him up, and drove him to hospital, because he’s been waiting for that surgery,” she said.
Both community health workers said that with more funding, their patients would benefit from a vehicle owned by Boat People SOS they could use to reliably drive patients to their appointments.
Coi Nguyen, a former Boat People SOS staff member who now works part time in health insurance, independently volunteers to do much of the same work. She drives some of the people she takes to the doctor’s office and interprets their medical visits. First, she makes sure patients who ride with her understand the risks. In 15 years living in the Gulf Coast Vietnamese community, she’s seen transportation be a persistent issue.
“They said that they cannot come to the appointment, nobody drive them,” she said. “So then now they cannot use the service even though the government pay, you know?”
Boat People SOS after this year
While having a few more staff would be “really, really good,” Tai Nguyen praised the small team’s ability to make the most of what resources they have.
“That’s sort of the mentality, we’re still going to get the job done regardless of what it takes,” he said.
For Ngo, who relies on Lien Nguyen for all his doctor’s appointments, a future without Boat People SOS would be difficult. He said that he would need to find someone else who speaks Vietnamese to help him, but doesn’t know who he would turn to.
“If he had a choice or was able to make the government change, he would like for it to have funds for us to help people like him,” Ngo said through Nguyen as his interpreter.
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