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WireTap

Fighting to Stay

By Beth Schwartzapfel, WireTap. Posted April 14, 2005.


Cambodian American youth are often caught between their parents' respect for authority and a growing number of lawmakers who want to see them sent -- often for the first time -- to Cambodia.
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Theary Voeul says her big brother, Sok, has always been a “really fun brother.” Every day, he would pick her up and dump her, giggling, on her bed, and challenge her to wrestling matches. They would go sledding in the winter and play football in the spring. He is also like a sister in some ways. “He has so much to say, gossip and stuff. He would talk about girls to me,” says Theary, 19.

Sok, 21, whose full name is Bunsok Cham Chhorm, was arrested when he was 19, following an incident where he fired an illegal handgun into the air. While out on bail, Sok stayed home and stayed out of trouble. He was a hardworking employee at a pool company, he joined an organization for Southeast Asian youth, and he helped the organization to paint colorful murals around town. So, when he went before the judge again, she could see he was trying. Instead of sending him to prison, she sentenced him to a three-year suspended sentence. “She didn’t want to lock him up,” recalls Theary. “She wanted him to go back to school, keep doing good.” But the judge had no control over the officers from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (formerly the INS), who were waiting to take Sok away.

Theary and her mom didn’t hear from him for weeks. They didn’t even know where he was until an immigration lawyer did them a favor and made some phone calls. They found out he is being held in a detention center in Louisiana, some 1600 miles from his home in Providence, Rhode Island, facing an order of deportation to Cambodia. Sok has never set foot in Cambodia – he was born in a refugee camp in Thailand before settling with his family in the US. He doesn’t speak Cambodian. In fact, ethnically, he is not even Cambodian. His family is from the Brao tribe, an ethnic minority from the highlands of Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand. Theary says being Brao will make Sok a target if he is sent back.

Sok is one of the 1200 to 1500 legal American residents who have been ordered deported to Cambodia, subject to ever-tightening laws regarding who may stay in the United States, and who must go.

The generation of Cambodians who were born in Southeast Asia and raised in the U.S. (often called the “1.5 generation”), who are now in their 20s and 30s, are subject to a unique set of circumstances. Whereas their children – even their younger siblings – were born here and are U.S. citizens, 1.5-ers are permanent residents, or green card holders. That is, they are here legally, but they are not citizens. They grew up first in refugee camps, then in poor urban neighborhoods, sharing homes with relatives or sponsors and negotiating a foreign language and foreign schools where they were made to feel like outcasts. “Think two or three people sharing a mattress in the worst part of town,” says Porthira Chhim, Director of Programs at Cambodian Community Development, based in Oakland, California.

The parents of the 1.5 generation, speaking little or no English and raised in Cambodian culture which teaches respect for authority, are largely deferent to the law and timid in the face of American bureaucracy. The older generation is also haunted by their experiences in Southeast Asia – by family members that were killed by the Khmer Rouge, by the time they might have spent in brutal “re-education camps,” by the villages where they grew up having been burned, razed, or bombed. As such, many suffer from alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder, and depression, which make them somewhat emotionally unavailable to their children. So, says Chhim, the 1.5-ers “gang together, out of survival, and the system punishes them for just trying to survive.” As a result, Cambodian young people are being deported in large numbers to a country that they fled for their lives before they were old enough to remember.

Chhim says this system amounts to a “criminalization of young people.” The good news is that young people are fighting back. Some of the same attributes that put them at risk for deportation – being part of the fabric of their communities here, not being intimidated by the system – make them excellent advocates. Youth-run organizations all over the country are working to stop deportation, and they have a long fight ahead of them.

It used to be that most permanent residents convicted of a deportable crime were entitled to a hearing, called a 212(c). At a 212(c), says Joren Lyons, Staff Attorney at the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco, “the judge would consider what age they immigrated here, where their family is, their employment history, their community ties, whether they were fluent in their home country’s language,” before issuing a deportation order. But two events changed that equation.

In 1996, Congress broadened the definition of an aggravated felony. Previously, aggravated felonies – felonies which are deportable – were limited to serious crimes such as murder or drug trafficking. With the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, the list of aggravated felonies grew to include anyone who serves more than a year in prison for theft or violent crime. Simultaneously, Congress decided that aggravated felons were no longer eligible for 212(c) hearings.


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Beth Schwartzapfel, 25, is a freelance journalist based in Rhode Island. She lives in Providence with her partner and her hound dog.

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View:
Fighting Deportation By Any Means Necessary Is Wrong
Posted by: kummonuss on Apr 15, 2005 7:02 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
While I sympathize with Sok's story, I think that Porthira Chhim's line of argument is reducto-ad-absurdum. He has been bottling the same old wine in a new bottle for some time now.

It's time he concede that some people DO need to be deported before I start sympathizing with his clients' cause.

Fighting deportation by any means necessary is wrong.

Deportation is not double punishment. It is an immigration and public safety issue.

I am so sick and tired of the abuse excuse (blame America for all your problems, including the creation of the Khmer Rouge because the "bombing" infuriated them--give me a break!), and of baseless arguments about how returning to Cambodia is a death sentence.

It is not.

I should know, I LIVE in Cambodia. The 127 who have returned are not systematically abused in any way. Sure, they would love to get back to America, but I'm sorry, their home is now Cambodia.

What I'd like to know is how crime among adolescent non-citizen Cambodians in America has dropped because of the fear that they'll be deported too.

I'm sorry to say but I do not want the well of sympathy on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge take-over of Phnom Penh to be spent on recidivists and aggravated felons.

Plenty of Cambodians who share a matress in the worst part of any town America don't end-up committing aggravated felonies (however loosely defined).

America is not to blame for their problems. Society is not to blame. Ultimately, they are to blame for the fateful decisions they made to commit a crime.

My heart goes out to Sok and others like him who appear to have shaped-up. But, sometimes, you need to face the music. Using a BAMN tactic, as does Mr. Chhim, does you a disservice. You are better served by an advocate who will concede that there are agregious cases meriting deportation, that some people really don't belong in America, and that not everything you do is someone else's problem.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

the "ghosts."
Posted by: sarah on Apr 24, 2005 2:46 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
i have a cambodian-american student who wrote essays to me on this issue of sending young cambdians raised in america back to SE Asia because they've been in trouble in the US too many times. He says back in their country, they are lost and suicidal.. unfamiliar with the culture, ettiquette, and even the native form of language. The Native cambodians call these American raised deportees "the ghosts." and shake their heads from pity. I think the new experimental policy to deport non-american born cambodians who were raised since infancy and/or young childhood in the US is cruel punishment, verging on racism. and after all, these kids are acting out because they were raised in the US environment... not enacting cultural norms from the cambodian land from which their mothers and fathers com

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

» RE: the "ghosts." Posted by: kummonuss