'Double Punishment': Thousands of Southeast Asian Refugees Face Deportation After Decades-Old Convictions

To advocate for the right to stay in the U.S., four employees of the Asian Prisoner Support Committee, an organization supporting formerly incarcerated Asians and Pacific Islanders, formed the APSC Four. Ai is joined by Chanthon Bun, Nghiep Lam and Maria Legarda. Because of the nature of their felonies, each group member had been stripped of their legal permanent resident status and issued removal orders. The group advocates for Gov. Gavin Newsom to grant them pardons to remain in the only country they’ve ever called home.

Three group members met KQED reporters in the lobby of the organization’s downtown Oakland headquarters one October morning. Inside the former massage parlor, the men, who met while incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison, sat in plastic chairs and exchanged weathered smiles and inside jokes.

Ai’s family fled the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian communist regime that committed a genocidal purge from 1975-1978. About 2 million people were killed, nearly a quarter of the Cambodian population.

Hundreds of thousands of Cambodians were forced to flee. Ai was born in Thailand under the shadow of the walls that enclosed a refugee camp. As a child in the camp, he would climb a nearby hill to harvest chilies as sounds of gunfire echoed.

More than 1.2 million Southeast Asian refugees settled in the U.S. after the Vietnam War.

Growing up in the U.S., Ai said he was consumed by fear and anger. He changed his routes to school to avoid racial harassment and getting beaten up. His father, in the throes of drug addiction, would disappear for months at a time, Ai told KQED. After the 1989 mass shooting incident, he began to isolate himself. By the time he was 12, a neighborhood gang had become his family.

Two years later, Ai and his friends attempted to rob a convenience store in San José. During the robbery, the store owner tried to grab Ai’s gun. When he yanked it away from her, the gun fired and the bullet went through her neck. Ai ran.

Months later, he turned himself in. He was tried as an adult and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. He was 15 when he was sentenced, becoming one of the state’s youngest “lifers.” After serving 19 years, Ai was granted parole. But he wasn’t released. Instead, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers picked him up.

Ai, now 41, wears an ankle monitor, and the low battery beep reminds him that his current life is in jeopardy.

“As a young person growing up in prison, no one was there for me,” Ai said. “As I got into counseling, I fell in love with it because it’s also healing for me to be able to help someone else.”

A surge of Southeast Asians resettled in the U.S. as refugees after 1975, and today, more than 3 million people of Southeast Asian descent live here, according to the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, or SEARAC, a national civil rights organization serving people of Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese descent. Since 1998, 17,000 have received final orders of removal for prior convictions and 2,000 have been deported.

Of the formerly incarcerated Southeast Asians that have been deported, less than 10 have been able to return to the United States, said Quyên Đinh, the executive director of SEARAC. Southeast Asians are at least three times more likely to be deported based on an old criminal conviction compared to other immigrants, according to the group.

Đinh said refugees were often resettled into historically low-income communities without support or resources. This led them to join gangs and participate in crime, placing them in what she referred to as “the school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline.”

“The model minority myth is at the root of why the APSC Four and some individuals are in this position in the first place because they weren’t seen and they weren’t heard in the school system when they should have had the resources to be supported and to thrive and heal as refugees and as children of refugees,” Đinh said.

Lam, of the APSC Four, was born in Vietnam, but his family fled after the Vietnam War. He said they were stranded in the South China Sea for six months before being rescued by fishermen. They were taken to a refugee camp in Hong Kong, where they stayed for two years before immigrating to the U.S.

Lam said he lived with the weight of feeling unwanted in his neighborhood. The family eventually put bars on their home, creating, according to Lam, a “mini prison inside our own apartment.” While living in Richmond as a teen, Lam found security with the Asian gang at his school. He was drawn to their stories.

“They were just like me — refugees. And so they dealt with discrimination, being bullied,” said Lam, 47. “We’re the same, even though we’re different Asian nationalities.”

Lam stopped playing sports and started getting into petty theft.

“It led from just hanging out, chilling, to getting into gang fights,” said Lam, who began to dress in the gang’s blue colors.

On Sept. 30, 1983, Lam said his mother paged him to come home. On the way, he saw rival gang members.

“‘Let’s go beat them up,’” he recalled saying to his friends. “We parked the car, got out of the car — there were three of us.”

They chased the gang members. When they caught up, Lam repeatedly stabbed one in the back. After the attack, the group drove back to a friend’s house.

The detail that still haunts Lam was the silence — nobody said a word in the car or at the house. The next day, he was arrested for murder. He later learned his friends had gone to the police and identified him. Lam spent the next 23 years in prisons across the state.

Bun, 44, was born in Cambodia, but grew up in a refugee camp in Thailand until churches sponsored his family to come to the U.S. After originally settling in Fort Worth, Texas, the family moved to Los Angeles to live in a Cambodian community.

To avoid constant bullying at school, he and his cousins started traveling in a pack. It wasn’t long before the pack morphed into a gang.

“By the age of 17, I was a lookout in a robbery. Nobody was harmed. And we were arrested right away. And I was sentenced to 49 years,” said Bun, who at the time was already a father of one and had another on the way. “Receiving all that time, I really gave up on life. I really didn’t care for my life.”

Phoeun You knows the hardship of being deported. He never called Cambodia home, but that’s where he has lived since his removal from the U.S. last year. His immigrant story is similar to that of the APSC Four, people he referred to as friends in a video interview with KQED.