Homeland Security targets Cambodians, Vietnamese Americans for deportation

SEARAC PHOTO

Cambodian Americans protest the deportations.

UPDATED Dec. 14 to include comments from NAPAWF.

WHILE MOST OF THE ATTENTION has been focused on Trump's Damn Wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and blocking Central American asylum seekers, the administration has been quietly been pushing to deport more refugees from Southeast Asia, primarily Vietnamese and Cambodians.

“We are horrified by the Trump administration’s announcement of intent to deport Southeast Asian immigrants. This stunning attack on Vietnamese and Cambodian immigrants means that many who have called the United States home for years and may have no memory of living elsewhere will be sent to a country they no longer recognize,” said Dorothy He of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum. 

“Like millions of other Asian immigrants, most of these individuals fled from war, hoping to rebuild their lives in a country they thought would respect their agency and right to make choices about their bodies, their lives, and their families. Now, they are being penalized for simply having dared to envision a better life — one without violence or fear,” she said.

As soon as next Monday (Dec. 17), 46 Cambodian American refugees are slated to be deported to Cambodia. It will be the largest deportation of Cambodians in U.S. history. The previous record of 40 was only eight months ago. One hundred Cambodian Americans have been deported this year, almost three times the number deported in 2017.

Between 1975 and 2000, the U.S. accepted 145,000 Cambodian refugees as part of an influx of Cambodians displaced by war.

In April, Cambodia told Washington that they would no longer accept deportations of Cambodian Americans after the Cambodian government witnessed the inhumane impacts of the deportations. Since then, the U.S. bullied Cambodia by threatening to impose travel sanctions on Cambodian officials looking to travel to the U.S.

The transition for Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees who resettled in the U.S. in the years following the Vietnam War was not easy. Due to ad hoc resettlement practices, they were often placed in resource-poor and economically deteriorating neighborhoods, where they lacked a supportive community or access to mental health services to cope with war-related trauma. 

Under these challenging conditions, some made mistakes leading to criminal convictions and ultimately deportation orders. Despite these early challenges, after serving their sentences, many have gone on to live productive lives, started families and found jobs.
Gov. Jerry Brown has pardoned a few of the young men so that they no longer were priorities for deportation, The San Francisco-based Asian Law Caucus has appealed to the California governor to pardon the Cambodians to prevent their deportation.

Also eligible for deportation are the Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in the country before the establishment of diplomatic ties between the U.S. and Vietnam and Cambodian Americans who fled the Khmer Rouge regime.

“We are seeing increased enforcement efforts, not just to detain those who are already vulnerable to removal but to pressure countries to expand how many people they are willing to accept overall,” said Katrina Dizon Mariategue, director of national policy at the nonprofit Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC). “It is clear that they are not taking into account factors such as impact on families and communities, nor the humanitarian implications of deporting refugees.”

A State Department spokesperson confirmed the U.S.-Vietnam negotiations to HuffPost but declined to divulge the full details of the “private diplomatic conversations.” The spokesperson noted, however, that “the U.S. Government and the Vietnamese Government continue to discuss our respective positions relative to Vietnamese citizens who are now subject to final orders of removal.”

Florida's Rep. Stephanie Murphy opposes Donald Trump's efforts to deport Southeast Asian refugees.

“My family fled Communist Vietnam when I was a baby because they would have rather died in search of light than to have lived in darkness,” Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., stated today (Dec. 12) on Twitter. “Thanks to a program under President Carter, we resettled to the U.S., and I became a proud citizen of this great nation.”

Murphy, the first Vietnamese American woman to serve in Congress, added in a second tweet, “As an American, I’m deeply concerned by [Trump’s] attempts to renegotiate the 2008 MOU between Vietnam and the U.S., which would potentially deport Vietnamese refugees who arrived in the U.S. before 1995.”

“This debate is about keeping our promises and honoring this country's longstanding humanitarian spirit,” Murphy said. “I urge [Trump] to be mindful of this proposed policy's impacts on thousands of families. We can keep America safe and continue to uphold our fundamental American values.”

Fifteen community organizations and over 50 state and local elected officials from 9 states joined Advancing Justice and SEARAC in sending letters to DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Donald Trump, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, urging them to halt any changes to the agreement that would make "pre-95" immigrants subject to deportation or weaken any of the humanitarian considerations reflected in the agreement.

Modifications to the agreement could potentially make over 8,500 individuals immediately vulnerable to deportation. Many of these community members came to the United States as refugees, fleeing war and persecution, and have lived here peacefully for decades.

"For many years now, the repatriation agreement between the U.S. and Vietnam has afforded thousands of former Vietnamese refugees the opportunity to move past mistakes they've made and rebuild their lives in the country that they call home," said Phi Nguyen, litigation director at Advancing Justice - Atlanta. 

"The agreement recognizes the inhumanity of forcing refugees to return to a country that they fled many years ago in the aftermath of a U.S.-backed war. Our government should not turn its back now on the very people it felt a responsibility to take in."

in the April issue of Foreign Service Journal Ted Osius, the former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, said he was told to pressure the Vietnamese government to take back more than 8,000 people ― most of whom were refugees who had “fled South Vietnam on boats and through the jungle” after the Vietnam War. Osius said he quit the State Department last year over the Trump administration’s plans to deport the refugees.

“The majority targeted for deportation — sometimes for minor infractions — were war refugees who had sided with the United States, whose loyalty was to the flag of a nation that no longer exists,” Osius wrote in the Journal. “And they were to be ‘returned’ decades later to a nation ruled by a communist regime with which they had never reconciled. I feared many would become human rights cases, and our government would be culpable.”

“America is my home now. All my family is here. My life is here," said Dai Diep, who came to the U.S. as a refugee in May 1995. "I hope that the U.S. government will act with honor and compassion—not just for myself but for the thousands of others who are in the same situation as me.”
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