Despite criminal convictions, past Republican and Democrat administrations have protected them from deportation since the end of the war decades ago.
Trump administration detains Vietnamese people who have been refugees since the war
After the Vietnam War ended 50 years ago, Republican and Democrat administrations protected refugees from deportation. Donald Trump is changing that.
For over a month, the 43-year-old Vietnamese sat in a Louisiana detention center waiting to see if he was deported to the country he fled as a boy.
Huy Quoc Phan, who has an American wife and children, is among the thousands of people who arrived as refugees after the end of the Vietnam War.
Alabama warehouse workers served in prison for 15 years for involvement in a robbery that led to the death of the shopkeeper.
His six-year-old wife, Amy, 39, said he knew about the crime that took place when he was 17.
“When I met him, I didn’t hold it against him,” she said. “I think we should give people a second chance.”
Both Republican and Democrat administrations agreed to immigrants from Vietnam, which the US disgraced at least 50 years ago. At least for immigrants from Vietnam. Immigrants from other countries were routinely deported after spending time in crime, while Vietnamese were allowed to stay.
There’s no more.
In his first administration, President Donald Trump tried to end that special treatment. Four months after the second term, he intensified his efforts to deport as many migrants as possible, including Vietnamese.
Tricia McLaughlin, deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said people like Fan deserve to be deported because of their criminal past.
“Under the leadership of President Trump and (DHS secretary Christie) Noem, ICE continues to protect Americans by detaining and removing criminal foreigners,” McLaughlin said in an email.
Refugee protection
Fifty years after Saigon’s collapse, these changes leave thousands of Vietnamese refugees like fans in Limbo, said Quyen Mai, executive director of California-based nonprofit Vietnamese American organization.
“We feel abandoned again,” he said.
As of late May, the Trump administration, along with other immigrants, had tried to take at least one Vietnamese to South Sudan. On May 27, observers noted that at least one deported flight appeared to have landed in Hanoi.
Vietnam has historically not accepted deportation from the United States except during Trump’s first administration. President Joe Biden largely halted such deportations when he took office.
Neither the Trump administration nor the Vietnamese government answered questions about changes to the agreement to detain Vietnamese immigrants or repatriates.
It is not clear how many Vietnamese migrants will be affected, but one Atlanta-based immigration lawyer represents more than 12 people already in custody. Lee Ann Felder Hayme, immigration rights lawyer for the San Francisco-based nonprofit Asian Law Caucus, said about 8,600 Vietnamese migrants are protected from deportation through an agreement between the countries.
After April 1975, the first wave of 125,000 people fled Vietnam arrived in the United States. By 2000, about 1 million Vietnamese people had settled here, according to the Institute for Immigration Policy. Most have become permanent residents.
“The US government has committed to those who recognized them as refugees that they were protected,” said Yana Lipman, a history professor at Turen University who studies Vietnam’s refugee population.
Fan is one of those who arrived as refugees before 1995, when the US and Vietnam reestablished relations 20 years after the end of the war.
The lawsuits settled in 2021 prevented the extension of these early immigration. The Biden administration has restricted removal. The Trump administration is currently about to resume deportation.
“This is a major obstacle to the president’s deportation program,” said Andrew Arthur, Resident Law and Policy Fellow at the Center for Immigration Research, a right-leasing think tank.
Vietnam is one of the most “repulsive” countries to accept exiles, he added. And he said Trump’s tough removal policy is looking forward to it rather than returning to the war that was 50 years ago.
Escape on a boat
The fans finally saw Vietnam from the boat.
He was born in 1982 to two farmers in Bintre, the Ministry of Agriculture in the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam.
His relatives, including his grandfather, fought against militias allied with American-backed South Vietnam, according to an asylum application for refugees reviewed by USA Today. They were sent to camps in the new Communist government’s reeducation prison where they were forced to work hard. Vietnamese officials seized a portion of the family’s land.
In a war-torn country, his parents decided to send their aunt Le Tifan (who was 25 at the time), their 3-year-old daughter and 7-year-old fan.
Two years later, the American immigration officer accepted Fan and his parents as refugees.
He clearly remembers his first American sight.
“The United States was lit up like a Christmas tree,” he told USA Today in a phone interview from the detention center. “It was magic.”
They settled in Metropolitan Atlanta.
He learned English, developed Southern Twang, and became a family translator. He cared for two young cousins.
Bad choices and redemption
Fan dropped out of school in the ninth grade and lived with other Vietnamese boys and men. He said he respected the wrong people.
On July 3, 1999, he and four others, who were then short on rent for under 17 years old, decided to take away a cafe in Vietnam. The detective described them as customers who formed “ad hoc robbery crews.”
Several others beat the shopkeeper and tried to give up money on him, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported at the time.
The fan was declared an adult and served in the Georgia State Jail for nearly 15 years, records show. The immigration judge issued a final removal order while in prison in 2002. He received his certificate of GED and technical training at the back of the bar.
Since his release in 2015, his family said he is not used to law enforcement.
Fans said he worked seven days a week at Little Caesar and nail salons until he met Amy on an online dating site. He got a stable job in the warehouse so he could spend more time with her.
Their family, now with their toddler, moved to Alabama last year and approached Amy’s sister before her death in February.
Arrest and detention
On April 14th, he heard him knock on the door while he waited for his 11-year-old son-in-law and three-year-old son to wake up. At the start of spring break he thought his son-in-law’s friend had started playing early.
Instead, it was the ice agent and our ex-s who handcuffed him. Amy wakes up to her husband calling out from the living room, where she handcuffs him around her and sees some agents.
The fans were confused. His work approval will remain valid until September. They cultivated his teenage beliefs.
“I’ve done something wrong in the past, but now there’s nothing wrong,” the fan said.
For two days, his wife couldn’t find him. He finally got a rather long call to tell her he headed to the LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana, to send out other detainees, including former Columbian student Mahmoud Khalil.
In a video of Tiktok with over 940,000 viewers, Amy begged “Please give me your husband back.”
On worn papers told “people of concern,” his supervisors and almost dozens of his colleagues were called “honorable individuals, company leaders, and valuable members of the community.” They hoped the court would take their letter into consideration.
He received documents ordered to leave the country, but he is unable to comply with those orders while he is in ice detention.
Amy, who hadn’t been on a plane since she was a baby, now wonders what it’s like to live in Vietnam.
Eduardo Quebus is based in New York City. Contact him by email at emcuevas1@usatoday.com or by signalling emcuevas.01.
