Fighting to Stay

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

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.

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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