From 1970 to 1975, Cambodia was ravaged by a bloody civil war. Pol Pot, French-educated leader of the pro-Communist force known as the Khmer Rouge, ruled Cambodia with extreme brutality.
His action led to a genocide that killed 1.7 million people out of the country’s population of 7 million. In the early days of occupation, very few refugees fled the country. The humanitarian crisis compelled the United States to take in 158,000 Cambodian refugees from 1975 through 1994, according to americanhistory.oxfordre.com.
Nak Kim Chhoeun, now 42, escaped the war and genocide that consumed Cambodia by coming to the United States at the age of 6 in 1981.
He left behind an unfamiliar country and called America his new home. Chhoeun became a lawful permanent resident when he was a child— his mother and six siblings are also legal U.S. citizens.
He is beloved by his family members and works as a skilled technician with AT&T, a job that he has held for 14 years.
In 1999, Chhoeun pleaded to a simple assault misdemeanor and for the unlawful possession of a firearm, according to a complaint receipt filed by the Asian Law Caucus. His conviction caused him to be scheduled for deportation to Cambodia in 2003.
The Cambodian government, however, declined to accept his repatriation. After filing a petition for writ of habeas corpus challenging his detention, Chhoeun was released from custody in 2003. He was never again convicted of any crimes and promptly complied with the terms of his order of supervision with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
On Oct. 20, 2017, ICE unexpectedly asked Chhoeun to report to its offices.
“They gave him a notice to check in with an ICE officer,” said Posda Tuot, Chhoeun’s cousin. “We had a feeling that something was strange. They told him to report to the same building, but it was a different floor and a different room.”
When he arrived, ICE officers arrested Chhoeun and transported him to the Theo Lacy prison facility in Orange.
“He walked in, and the last text message he sent me was that he’s ‘not walking back out,'” Tuot said.
Chhoeun is one of the many Cambodians ICE detained last month. Anoop Prasad, staff attorney with the Immigrant Rights Program of the Asian Law Caucus based in San Fransisco, told the Signal Tribune that the raids “are by far the largest ever conducted targeting the Cambodian community.”
[aesop_quote type=”block” background=”#282828″ text=”#000000″ align=”center” size=”1″ quote=”He’s more than a cousin— he’s my brother.” cite=”Posda Tuot, Nak Kim Chheoun’s cousin” parallax=”off” direction=”left” revealfx=”off”]
He said that many Cambodian refugees came to the U.S. as infants and young children. Most of them were born in refugee camps after their parents fled the country. The U.S. government housed most of these refugees in impoverished neighborhoods with low housing costs and high crime rates.
Virtually all of the individuals currently detained by ICE and awaiting deportation have had a previous criminal conviction, according to Prasad.
“The most common scenario that we hear from everyone is that their parents were struggling adjusting to life in a new country,” Prasad said. “Reports suggest that upwards of 90 percent of people had post-traumatic stress disorder, but there were really no mental-health services, and basically everyone reports growing up around gang violence.”
In the mid 1990s, the U.S. government began to funnel convicted refugees from criminal custody to immigration custody and were ordered to be deported back to Cambodia. At the time, the Cambodian government was barely reestablishing its relations with the U.S., which had fallen apart under the Khmer Rouge and during the bombing campaigns in the Vietnam War.
In 2002, an agreement between the U.S. and Cambodia allowed for over 500 people to be deported back to Cambodia once the country had reestablished its capacity to receive deportees. Currently, there are about 19,000 Cambodians who have not been accepted for deportation, according to Prasad.
“The Trump administration has been escalating pressure on countries that don’t fully cooperate in taking people back for deportation,” Prasad said.
He wrote in his email that the raids “are directly in retaliation against the Cambodian government expressing concern over the humanitarian impact of deportations targeting Cambodian refugees.”
Prasad said that last year, Cambodian officials interviewed deportees from the U.S. and came to the realization that they do not speak the language, many have never been to the country and most have no surviving relatives in Cambodia.
“The Cambodian government was perplexed as to why they were doing this,” he said. “They asked the U.S. last year to renegotiate the agreement so it is more humane. ICE responded by putting sanctions on Cambodia about a month ago, and then these raids followed.”
Janice Hahn, LA County 4th District supervisor, wrote a letter to the Department of Homeland Security on Oct. 24 questioning the increase in the raids and deportations of Cambodians by ICE. As reported in a previous Signal Tribune article, Liz Odendahl, communications director for Hahn’s office, said they first heard of the ICE detentions from a family in Long Beach who had a relative in ICE custody. It was later revealed that Chhoeun’s family is the one that was put in contact with Hahn’s office through a family friend, according to Tuot.
Hahn mentioned in her letter that speculation surrounding the increase in ICE raids are linked back to disagreements between the U.S. and Cambodian governments.
Alan Lowenthal, California’s 47th District congressmember, told the Signal Tribune during a phone interview Wednesday that there are various political disagreements between the two countries, specifically surrounding Cambodia’s voting policies.
According to the United States Institute for Peace, a political crisis from 2013 to 2014 over disputed elections caused analysts to debate how the country can consolidate democracy and advance reconciliation before the next national election in 2018.
“Congress is pressuring the Cambodian government to have free and fair elections,” Lowenthal said.
He added that Sen. John McCain, Sen. Dick Durbin and Sen. Ted Cruz have come forth and asked the Cambodian government to implement these changes.
Although the Asian Law Caucus has labeled the ICE raids as the largest on the Cambodian community in recent times, Lowenthal said that his colleagues are gathering data to determine if it is a dramatic increase.
He added that, in the past, ICE was more open to discussing its detention and deportation operations and that it is no longer that way.
“It’s difficult to get bipartisan support,” Lowenthal said. “Democrats want an immigration reform, and Republicans are more rigid.”
On Wednesday morning, various departments of a nonprofit civil-rights advocacy group called the Asian Americans Advancing Justice hosted press conferences in Los Angeles and San Fransisco to announce the filing of a lawsuit against ICE to stop its raids on Cambodian refugees.
Lowenthal said he was aware of the lawsuit and that it pertained to the irregularities of the ICE detentions.
Tuot said that he visited Chhoeun the first day he could following his detention. Chhoeun informed his cousin that an ICE officer told him that they were planning to move him to a different detention facility in either Louisiana or somewhere in California.
Currently, Chhoeun is awaiting Cambodian travel documents that would allow him to be transported to the country, according to Tuot.
A complaint receipt from the Asian Law Caucus reads that “ICE did not provide Chhoeun with notice of the reason for his arrest or an opportunity to respond. Nor has Chhoeun received individualized consideration before a neutral decision maker of whether he poses a danger or flight risk.”
“I grew up with no brothers,” Tuot said. “He’s more than a cousin— he’s my brother. He kept me out of trouble. The footsteps that he walked in that he messed up in, he made sure that I didn’t do the same thing. When I got that text message, I felt like I was missing something.”
