Why Is the US Deporting Protected Vietnamese Immigrants?

Before being deported from the United States and returned to his native Vietnam on December 20, 2017, Pham Chi Cuong, a wiry 47-year-old with intense eyes and a shock of graying hair, was living his version of the American Dream. He worked as a sushi chef in Orlando, Florida and lived with his wife and three children, aged 27, 25, and 18.

Cuong arrived in the United States on October 31, 1990 under the Amerasian Homecoming Act, which covered the children of American service members born in Vietnam between 1962 and 1976. In 2000 he was convicted of assault and battery and served 18 months in prison. Then, in 2007 he was placed on probation for driving under the influence.

These convictions made him eligible for deportation, but in 2008, Vietnam and the U.S. signed a bilateral immigration agreement stating that no Vietnamese immigrants who arrived before July 12, 1995 would be subject to return, even if they had a criminal record. That is the date the two countries formally established diplomatic ties.

Cuong never became an American citizen since he thought he was protected by this agreement, but that status appears to have changed under the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, a fact often overlooked in the broader narrative of warming ties between the two former combatant countries.

The Agreement

For years Vietnam has resisted accepting deportees from the United States, and the country has been listed as “recalcitrant” by the Trump administration. The 2008 agreement was meant to ensure that the Vietnamese government wouldn’t have to take back individuals who had left before the country normalized relations with the United States. That began to change in 2017.

“We started getting news last year that Vietnamese people around the country with final orders of removal were being picked up by ICE [the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency],” says Phi Nguyen, litigation director at Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Atlanta, via Skype. “There was a big roundup in March in Miami [2017], and a second round in October and November in Georgia.”

According to figures provided by ICE, as of last December there were over 8,600 Vietnamese nationals in the United States subject to a final order of removal. At that time 7,821 of these individuals had criminal convictions. However, ICE does not track the year each of these individuals arrived in the United States, making it difficult to ascertain how many pre-1995 immigrants face potential deportation.

The Deportations

A 2001 Supreme Court case holds that the government can hold detainees for up to 180 days. If, Phi explains, the individual hasn’t been deported by that point, “the burden really shifts to the government to prove that deportation is likely in the reasonably foreseeable future, and if they can’t meet that burden, then they’re supposed to release people from custody.”

Tin Nguyen (no relation), an immigration lawyer at Central Law Group in Charlotte, North Carolina, explains that activists and immigration specialists became increasingly worried last year as word that ICE was no longer following this ruling spread.

“People that came before 1995, they would be released after 180 days under the Obama administration,” Tin says. “Now, they would stay longer. Then there were the deportations, and that’s when we knew that this was unprecedented.”

In late December, Cuong was flown from the United States to Vietnam along with 17 other Vietnamese immigrants. According to Tin, six had arrived in America prior to 1995, an apparent violation of the agreement discussed above.

It wasn’t until this April, however, that these deportations gained broader attention. That month, Ted Osius, the Obama-appointed former ambassador to Vietnam, wrote an essay for the American Foreign Service Association stating that he had been ordered to pressure the Vietnamese government to receive every Vietnamese immigrant subject to deportation in the United States.

“The majority targeted for deportation…were war refugees who had sided with the United States, whose loyalty was to the flag of a nation that no longer exists,” Osius wrote. “And they were to be ‘returned’ decades later to a nation ruled by a communist regime with which they had never reconciled. I feared many would become human rights cases, and our government would be culpable.” The diplomat resigned in protest.