-Colleen Chung
Imagine, for a second, that your home country has all of a sudden erupted into civil war. You find yourself on the “wrong side” of the political divide, living in constant fear that you will one day face government retaliation in the form of violence or even death. Besides having to witness your friends and family members being imprisoned and their homes destroyed by bombs, you have been living a life of near-impoverishment. There is never enough food, water, and resources to go around the community during the war. You haven’t gone to school in years and any hope that you will ever attend is destroyed. All the while, conditions are worsening to the point that you and your family are now considering drastic action: fleeing to the United States. The journey is grueling and will traumatize you for years, as you have to cross the South China Sea in an overcrowded vessel battling disease, starvation, and even pirates. Nonetheless, you find yourself at the mercy of an entirely new country. You are starting life all over again with absolutely no resources, support, or language skills, excluded to the confines of a low-income community with few opportunities for social mobility. As the months go by, you are still barely able to pull yourself out of poverty. Joining a gang seems the only viable option to increase your stock in life, and so, you commit a “crime” to feed your family, protect yourself, pay the bills, whatever your needs are at the moment. You are then arrested by the police, given a harsh sentence disproportionate to the gravity of the crime, and your Green card is revoked. As a stateless refugee, you have no choice but to comply and serve your time. After your release years later and having established your own business in the community, you are told that due to changes in US-Vietnam relations, your past crime that you have just served time for makes you eligible for deportation and being sent back to the country you fled from years ago.
This is the reality hundreds of Vietnamese-Americans are facing as they await final deportation orders for crimes they committed as minors in the midst of poverty. In March of 2017, ICE began rounding up and detaining an estimated 8,000 immigrants, among them a couple hundred Cambodian and Vietnamese immigrants with criminal records, most of whom were refugees. Eleven Vietnamese immigrants ended up being deported. Although the Trump administration backtracked on deportation efforts for a while, it is now arguing that it can deport Vietnamese refugees if they have committed acts that render them ineligible to remain in the U.S., since the 2008 repatriation agreement does not explicitly prohibit such removals. This reinterpretation is flagrant deal-breaking of the protection from deportation clause on the part of the administration; and it is paving the way for ICE to unjustly re-arrest released detainees and intimidate them into deporting themselves. The vast majority of these crimes Vietnamese-Americans are charged for and deported over are not even violent. Most are minor, nonviolent infractions such as petty larceny, drug possession, and driving under the influence- all deportable offenses under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). Considering the double displacement and trauma these refugees have faced both in Vietnam and now the U.S., the government could do better to drop these long-forgotten charges.
Not only would detaining and deporting Vietnamese immigrants for crimes they committed as impoverished teenagers put them in danger of state persecution upon return, it inflicts further state violence upon the very people who fled state violence during the Vietnam War, for which the U.S. was involved in. It is also bad policy based on unfounded, anti-immigrant claims that all immigrants pose a threat to public safety (in fact, a study by the Immigration Policy Center found that 68% of legal permanent residents who are deported are deported for minor, nonviolent crimes; only 0.46% of Vietnamese immigrant men ages 18-39 were incarcerated as opposed to 0.57% of non-Hispanic white immigrant men in 2000-https://www.policefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Appendix-D_0.pdf). Katrina Mariategue of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center summed up the psychosocial aspect of further state violence on the Vietnamese refugee community best: “Just remember that a lot of the challenges and struggles Southeast-Asian Americans face in the country is also a result of the fact that they weren’t supported in many ways upon entry to the country. A lot of them who ended up being incarcerated resettled in communities with high poverty and crime rates. That is a good history lesson in terms of how we support new refugee communities.”
Colleen Chung is an M.A. Candidate at The Graduate Center, CUNY whose research focuses on the intersections of law and public policy. She is the proud daughter of two Vietnamese refugees.