[This story was updated for clarity on July 25. “As reported by multiple media outlets, You spent 25 years in prison for committing a gang-related shooting that took the life of one person” was updated to “As reported by multiple media outlets, You spent 25 years in prison for killing someone in a gang-related shooting.”]
Former Long Beach resident Phoeun You is awaiting deportation back to Cambodia, a country he hasn’t been to since he was 4 years old. Only a pardon from Gov. Gavin Newsom can keep him in the United States.
“He’s actually really stressed out right now and he has a lot of anxiety […],” said Darien Ong, an organizer with the Long Beach Southeast Asian (LB SEA) Anti-Deportation Collective. “He’s on edge every day because at any moment he can just be transferred and he can be deported instantly.”
The collective has been advocating for the release of You since 2021, after hearing of his plight from the Asian Prisoners Support Committee.
As reported by multiple media outlets, You spent 25 years in prison for killing someone in a gang-related shooting.
He has been in custody since Nov. 20, 1996, and was granted parole on Aug. 3, 2021, according to the California Department of Correction and Rehabilitation’s (CDCR) Inmate Locator.
According to a statement released by multiple immigration advocacy groups, while incarcerated, You graduated from the Victim Offender Education Program, was involved with Bay Area Women Against Rape, took a sheet metal certification shop, addiction recovery counseling program, studied non-violent communications, participated in peer health education program by re-entry nonprofit Centerforce, and received an associates degree in 2015 from Patten University.
“The hardships I would face if deported would be unjust and unnecessary, especially when I have so much that I hope to offer my community here,” You said in a statement LB SEA posted on their Instagram in December 2021.
Instead of being released on parole, You was transferred into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). While CDCR is not required by law to work with ICE, many inmates who are also immigrants are handed over to ICE at the end of their sentences instead of being released.
This practice has been criticized by immigration advocates as excessive and unfair, arguing that it punishes immigrants more than citizens for the same crimes.
In fiscal year 2017, ICE arrested 1,600 people held at CDCR facilities and another 1,100 people in fiscal year 2018, according to a class action lawsuit against ICE.
According to the same lawsuit, between Jan. 1, 2020 and May 13, 2020, approximately 575 people were transferred to ICE custody directly from CDCR.
The LB SEA Anti-Deportation Collective fights against the deportation of Southeast Asian immigrants in Long Beach, leading campaigns asking the public to support detained immigrants from Cambodia, Vietnam and more.
“Not only are they being separated from their families, they’re being sent to a land that they’re not familiar with,” Ong said.
While many Southeast Asian immigrants have lived in the United States under refugee status since they were children, their permanent residency status can be easily lost if they commit a crime. There have been multiple cases of Southeast Asian deportees being sent back to countries they have little or no memory of.
Ong said he is in contact with community members who have already been deported, and recalled the ongoing struggles they face when forcibly removed from the United States.
“They rely on their families here for financial help,” Ong said. “And they feel very isolated over there and all they do is yearn for the chance to be able to come back home where they actually belong. And the transition hasn’t been easy because they are still seen as foreigners on their land too.”
ICE has stated that immigrants who have been detained in California jails and prisons should continue to be transferred directly into ICE custody to await deportation proceedings.
“It is a great injustice for our community and law enforcement officers to see criminals, who pose a risk of reoffending and danger to the public and should therefore be turned over to ICE, released into the public instead,” ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations Los Angeles Field Office Director Dave Marin said in a statement sent to the Signal Tribune in May 2020.
Local immigrant advocacy groups, such as the LB SEA Collective and the Long Beach Immigrant Rights Coalition, have voiced their support of a bill that could end the transfer of immigrants in CDCR custody to ICE.
The Voiding Inequality and Seeking Inclusion for Our Immigrant Neighbors (VISION) Act, Assembly Bill (AB) 937, would entitle immigrants to the same rules of release and parole as citizens, preventing them from being transferred to ICE after being granted parole or release from CDCR.
If passed into law, the VISION Act would prevent cooperation between CDCR, California police departments and ICE, such as sharing an inmate’s release date and immigration status.
“Once a Californian has paid their debt to society, and earned their release from our state prisons or jails, they should be released back to society rather than funneled into immigration detention and deportation,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement in February 2020.
A previous version of the bill, AB-2596, which was co-sponsored by the Sanctuary Long Beach Coalition was killed in committee in May 2020.
The current VISION Act is being considered by the state senate, after being passed by the Senate Appropriations Committee in August 2021.
According to Ong, in June LB SEA members traveled to a rally at the governor’s office in Sacramento to ask that he support the VISION Act but got no response from Newsom.
