Cambodian American refugee wins reprieve from deportation

Ched Nin celebrates with his family.

ASAM NEWS

AFTER SPENDING six months in immigration detention and being under the threat of deportation, Minnesota resident Ched Nin is back in the loving company of his wife and five children.

Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents arrested Nin in August and began the process of deporting him back to Cambodia because of a 2010 conviction. Nin served two years for that conviction and says deportation on top of that would have been a life sentence.

A judge ruled in February that deporting him would be an undue hardship and ordered him released and returned his green card.

“I am happy to be back home with my family and am moved by the love and support of the community,” said Nin Wednesday (March 8). “My family and I went through a lot these past six months and my heart breaks for those who continue to be separated from their families. I know there is still more work to be done, and I want to help keep families together.”

The ruling comes after an intense campaign by the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, (SEARAC), Mijente, and the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild.Nin’s wife Jenny and seven other Minnesota families whose loved ones also faced imminent deportation are part of a campaign to release the Minnesota 8.

“Jenny and the 'Release Minnesota 8' campaign demonstrate the power of grassroots organizing and embody the fierce resilience of our refugee communities,” said Quyen Dinh, executive director of SEARAC. “Ched was finally released through legal channels, but it took months of community mobilization by Cambodian Americans and advocates to come this far.”

Nin came to the United States as a refugee at age six in 1986 with his family. He was born in and stayed in Refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines for six years before coming to the United States.

Nin was represented by University of Minnesota Law professor Linus Chan and students John Hoag and Shane Fizmaurice through the James Bringer Center for New Americans.

Dinh added, "While we celebrate Ched's release, it hurts to see so many other refugee families suffering. We'll continue to fight on a systemic level for policies that recognize rehabilitation, second chances, and the sanctity of family."

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Burma is the largest source of refugees to the U.S.

Burmese emissary Aung San Suu Kyi met with President Obama last week.

NEARLY HALF of all refugees entering the U.S. are Muslim, according to a Pew report.

With most of the media attention and campaign rhetoric focused on the refugees coming from war-torn Syria, the country that actually sending the greatest number of refugees to the United States is going unnoticed.

The Obama administration has informed Congress it wants to increase the number of refugees accepted to the U.S. next year from 85,000 to 110,000.

But it's not Syria, or Iraq or the gang violence-ridden country of Guatemala, that is sending the most refugees here at the moment.

It's Burma.

Burma, also known as Myanmar, sent 18,386 refugees to the U.S. in 2015. Let's hope that Donald Trump doesn't get wind of this news.

In fact, in 2015 that southeast Asian country made up over a quarter of all refugees entering the U.S., almost a 130 percent increase from 2014.

As of mid-August this year, the U.S. has received more than 63,000 refugees, about 22,000 short of the 85,000 ceiling set by the Obama administration at the beginning of fiscal 2016. 

According to a Pew study, Burma (Myanmar) still tops the list with 10,464 refugees, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 10,417; Syria, 8,569; and Iraq, 7,479; are the top origin countries of refugees arriving thus far in 2016. Together, refugees from these four nations represent more almost 60 percent of all refugees admitted to the U.S. this fiscal year.

Pew notes that the number of refugees admitted to the United States has typically been contingent on the state of conflict around the world. The Balkan wars of the 1990s helped drive the flow of resettlement in that period; it reached a peak of 142,000 refugees resettled in the U.S. in 1993.

The primary reason for the exodus from Burma are long-standing fighting between ethnic groups. Thousands of ethnic Karen and Karenni have fled persecution from the former military regime that ran the country for a half-century. Most of them ended up in refugee camps in Thailand and have been resettled in countries around the world, including the United States.

"They've been there for generations, and for some all they've ever known are the refugee camps," said Derek Mitchell, who served as U.S. ambassador to Burma from 2012 until earlier this year. "This is an ethnic conflict that is going on 70 years and drives this country."

The refugee issue was brought up in the talks between President Obama and Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi Sept. 14 where they also agreed to the lifting of sanctions against the government of Burma. Both leaders stressed that this does not mean letting the Burmese government off the hook for corruption and human rights abuses.

Suu Kyi said that her top priority now is reconciliation between the countries' various ethnic groups. She has been criticized in the past for not being vocal about the plight of the Rohingya Muslim minority, which has long been denied citizenship in the Buddhist-majority nation.

The plight of the Rohingyas has been monitored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations,, a U.S.-based human rights advocacy group, which has opposed the lifting of sanctions. “In your meetings with Minister Suu Kyi, CAIR requests that you raise the issue of Rohingya refugees as well as ask her to lift the ban on aid allowing all international relief organizations to freely operate in the Burmese state of Rakhinya," read a CAIR statement issued before Obama's meeting with Suu Kyi.

"We are sincere in trying to bring together the different communities," Suu Kyi told the press, saying that citizenship should be extended to everyone who is entitled to it.

TGIF FEATURE: A Good Friday message

LAST PALM SUNDAY, I took this picture at St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco. It's a good message to ponder today, Good Friday. I thought it was relevant to the issue about immigration and refugees that is part of the heated rhetoric coming from the presidential candidates and their supporters. 

Perhaps the people who call themselves Christians who are in favor of closing our borders, deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, rejecting Syrian refugees, and returning the Central American children fleeing the violence in their home countries can understand this message. 

This plaque is on the right wall (as you enter the main entrance) next to the sculpture of the Holy Family fleeing to Egypt.

BuzzFeed: U.S. crackdown on undocumented Sikh immigrants

The U.S. Army changed dress policies to allow male Sikh members to retain their turbans and beards.

ONE OF the many stories mainstream media has not reported on is the deportation of undocumented immigrants from India.

The U.S. government has moved quietly and aggressively to prevent undocumented Indians from entering the United States, many of whom are Sikhs fleeing political repression or economic collapse at home.

This unnoticed phenomenon is exposed in a pretty comprehensive article by David Noriega and Jonn Templon of BuzzFeed News entitled "America's Quiet Crackdown On Indian Immigrants."

The number of Indian nationals caught trying to cross the southern border into the U.S. exploded suddenly in 2010, growing sixfold to 1,200 from just over 200 the year prior.

Although the number has oscillated since then, it has remained near an all-time high. And that includes only those caught trying to cross undetected, leaving out Buta Singh and others like him — thousands, mostly young men, who walk up to a border crossing, turn themselves in, and plead asylum. The total number of Indian nationals who tried to enter the U.S. without papers, including through airports and other points of entry, also spiked in the last five years, peaking at close to 13,000 in 2013, more than double the number in 2009.

Much of this influx, according to dozens of interviews with immigrants, experts, and current and former immigration officials, comes from young Indian men at the border, ferried there by transnational smuggling networks. Although border authorities do not track the religious or regional origins of migrants, government officials and other observers say that large numbers of the new arrivals are Sikhs from Punjab, a region in northwestern India beset by economic collapse and environmental degradation, a major drug epidemic, and decades of what human rights groups describe as political violence carried out with impunity.

While the article follows one man's journey from India to the United States, it is a well-worn path that thousands -- not only from India but also Pakistan, China and from the Middle East  -- have apparently followed.

BuzzFeed News

The U.S. immigration enforcement apparatus has responded harshly to these new arrivals. Before the spike, only about a quarter of Indian nationals were detained at the beginning of their deportation hearings. But, according to federal data analyzed for the first time by BuzzFeed News, that percentage shot up dramatically around 2010, coinciding with the rise in Indian nationals at the border.

In 2013, 83% of Indians facing deportation were imprisoned — a far larger percentage than for immigrants from any other country, including Mexico, which had the highest overall rate of detention between 2003 and 2014. (BuzzFeed News obtained the data through a Freedom of Information Act request from the Executive Office for Immigration Review, or EOIR, the branch of the Justice Department that operates the country’s immigration courts.)

Read the complete article.

For more news about Asian/Americans and Pacific Islanders, read AsAm News.