|
Decades after flight, Cambodians face
deportation due to crime and a lost chance at U.S. citizenship.
Mout Iv owns a barbershop in Olney. Chally
Dang repairs copiers and fax machines. Hak Ouk works at a packaging
company.
The U.S. government brought them to
Philadelphia as refugees from Cambodia's killing fields. Now, two
decades or more later, the U.S. government is threatening to deport
them back - for what they did, and didn't do, here in America.
For Mout and Chally, both of whom arrived
in the United States as children, Cambodia is a land they scarcely
know or understand. For Hak, a generation older, Cambodia is the
graveyard for his family, killed in the genocide.
This is a story about responsibility and
obligation - theirs, and the government's.
With immigrants pouring into the United
States, legal and illegal, it is also a cautionary tale about what
happens to those from desperately poor countries who grow up in
America's toughest city neighborhoods, isolated, desperate and
confused.
The government's initiation of
deportation proceedings against Cambodian refugees is but the
latest painful chapter in America's long and tragic involvement in
Southeast Asia, beginning in the 1960s with the Vietnam War.
As refugees, the Cambodians were eligible
for citizenship after five years in the United States - but
two-thirds have not become citizens. Thus, they remain subject to
deportation laws if they commit crimes.
To date, 169 Cambodian refugees -
including at least three from Philadelphia - have been deported
since Cambodia signed a treaty with the fixUnited States in 2002,
agreeing to accept those still legally its citizens. It was one of
the last countries in the world to do so.
In Philadelphia's Cambodian community,
the fourthcq-largest in America, the government's policy of
deporting refugees with criminal records has become highly
controversial, given America's role in destabilizing Cambodia and
the hardships those refugees have faced since their arrival.
"They feel like they've been betrayed
their whole lives," said Helly Lee, an advocate with the Southeast
Asia Resource Action Center. "Coming here and being thrown in
ghettos, and being in that cycle of poverty - and then to be sent
back to a country they don't know."
Pat Reilly, an Immigration and Customs
Enforcement spokeswoman, responded that U.S. law requires, without
exception, the deportation of immigrants who commit crimes.
"We just enforce the laws that are on the
books," she said, "and there is no special status for
refugees."
Mout, Chally and Hak don't pretend to be
choirboys. Mout, 30, and Chally, 25, take full responsibility for
gang-related assaults they took part in when they were much
younger.
Hak, 58, deeply regrets that night in
February 2000 when he lost his cool at a Philadelphia Parking
Authority impoundment lot and fired a gun in the air.
But their biggest mistake, it turns out,
was what they didn't do: They never sought to become citizens.
"It's always in the back of your mind, to
be a citizen," Mout said, "but the streets had me."
Should they now be subject to the same
deportation proceedings as economic immigrants?
Leaders and advocates in the Cambodian
community believe the U.S. government has a special obligation to
those who came here as refugees. The Maoist-inspired fixKhmer Rouge
regime emptied the cities, set up work camps, and killed as many as
two million people in a geopolitical nightmare that the United
States helped create.
They also wonder whether more could and
should have been done to help Cambodian refugees navigate the
citizenship process. The fact that so many Cambodians living here
have not become citizens, they say, is evidence of the community's
isolation, ignorance of the law, or fear of authority.
"Resources weren't available to help with
the integration process. There was a lot of shock," Lee said. "Just
surviving was totally different than what they were used to."
A dream deferred
If Mout had become a citizen, he would be
considered a success story - someone who turned his life around in
prison.
Like Mout, most of those facing
deportation were children when they were brought here and thrown
into an urban cauldron.
For Mout, born in 1977, Cambodia has
existed only in hazy, painful memories of early childhood. Raised
in the United States from the age of 9, he knows more about hip-hop
and the Phillies than fixKhmer society and culture.
His old-school barbershop, at Front and
Champlost Streets in Olney, is a shrine to Philadelphia sports:
Flyers calendars and Sixers foam fingers, Phillies bobbleheads and
framed front pages from the Eagles' last Super Bowl.
Standing at a barber chair, his clippers
gliding through a customer's hair, Mout reflected on the path he
had taken, from a sick child whose mother carried him through the
Cambodian jungle to escape war and atrocity, to a homeowner and
proprietor with a loyal clientele.
"I'm living the American dream," he
said.
Mout can't quite believe that he owns a
home and a business, just 31/2 years after getting out of prison.
He gives all the credit to God.
"I went astray, but he let me go. Just
like the parable of the . . .," he said, momentarily
distracted.
"The prodigal son," his customer said.
It was in 1998, the day after his 21st
birthday, that Mout and some friends robbed a man in Olney.
Mout served more than four years in state
prison and then was held in federal immigration detention for a
year pending deportation. He was set free in January 2004 under
supervision, and has been waiting ever since for the Cambodian
government to process his deportation papers.
Mout doesn't know when Cambodia will be
ready. For now, he lives in the moment. Every six months he must
report to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services at 16th and
Callowhill Streets.
"I'm scared to death when I go in there
because you don't know if you're going to get out," he said. "But
I go because I have faith in the Lord. . . . If it happens, it
happens for a reason."
Surviving the streets
The 2000 U.S. census estimated the city's
Cambodian population at 6,570 people, although the Cambodian
Association of Greater Philadelphia insists the number is three
times that many.
While there have been many individual
success stories, others in the community have been left isolated
and needy because of poverty, lack of education, mental illness or
language difficulties.
"Basically they knew how to survive in the
jungle," said Rorng Sorn, an advocate at the Cambodian Association.
"A lot of them, when they came into the city, they had a hard time
adapting to the lifestyle."
For the children, often raising
themselves, the lure of the streets was strong.
Chally, Mout's cousin, has never even set
foot in Cambodia. Born in 1982 in a refugee camp in Thailand, he
was an infant when his family was resettled in what he describes as
a roach- and rat-infested apartment in Logan.
"Stuck us right in the 'hood," he said.
"Programs that helped get us on our feet? Welfare, and not much
else."
His mother was still traumatized by her
experience in Cambodia's killing fields. Once in Philadelphia, she
fought the ghosts of the past and found solace in drink.
With such a depressed parent, Chally ran
the streets, joined a gang of Asian kids, and got arrested for
burglary for the first time at age 10.
"If you're with other Cambodians, they
understand you," he explained. "You can relate to each other. 'Oh,
you were a refugee? I'm a refugee.' "
In 1997, when he was 15, Chally was
involved in two shootings, one of them a drive-by in which he fired
at a rival gang.
He was arrested that year and tried as an
adult for aggravated assault. He served more than five years, then
did six months of detention in Immigration Court in York, Pa.
Chally, using the jail law library, won
his freedom by citing a 1996 Supreme Court decision that said
deportable immigrants cannot be held indefinitely if their home
countries can't take them back. The court placed a six-month limit
on detention.
In prison, Chally picked up vocational
skills and now works as a digital tech, repairing copiers and other
office electronics. He has, he said, left his old ways behind.
No matter. Chally could now lose contact
with his three children, all younger than 3, if he gets
deported.
"I really want to be around until the kids
get to an age that I can explain to them the way things are, the
way things will be," he said. "I don't want them to be at an age
when they don't understand. . . . 'Why is Daddy in another
country? Does Daddy love me?' "
Defiance, resignation
Unlike Mout and Chally, Hak grew up in
Cambodia. As a young man, he served in the army under Prime
Minister Lon Nol, a U.S. ally. Lon Nol sent about 500 troops,
including Hak, to fight in Vietnam alongside the Americans.
During the Vietnam War, the United States
destabilized Cambodia with a massive bombing campaign that was
aimed at North Vietnamese troops, but killed and displaced
thousands of civilians. The U.S. government also supported a coup
by a more pro-American regime. Historians believe both actions
aided the rise of the Khmer Rouge, whose crimes the United States
then largely ignored.
When the Khmer Rouge took control of
Cambodia and killed his mother and eight of his siblings, Hak made
his way to a refugee camp in Thailand - and then to Philadelphia in
1976 as a refugee.
"I no want to come here," he said, "but
you bring me here. My whole family die in Cambodia, and now I have
family here. And you try to send me back?"
Hak soon became a leader of his community,
helping neighbors and coworkers. He has children nearly the same
age as Chally, all educated in Philadelphia's Catholic
schools.
But all of his good deeds and hard work
have been overshadowed by what happened one night in February 2000
at a Philadelphia Parking Authority lot near Oregon Avenue.
Hak, working as a tow-truck driver, got
into a fight over a friend's car and was beaten by another driver,
he said.
Hak said after he had tried in vain to get
a police officer to intercede, he returned with an unregistered
.45-caliber Beretta and fired two shots.
Hak insisted he had fired in the air. The
other driver, who denied beating Hak, said Hak had fired at his
truck.
In the end, Hak served five months of
house arrest for aggravated assault.
Hak believes the United States, in seeking
now to deport him, is being unfair. "I fought for the American Army
for three years," he said. "I'm lucky I didn't die. If I didn't
go to Vietnam War, I never come here, no way."
In an interview at his South Philadelphia
home, Hak alternated between defiance and resignation.
"Two more years and I'll hit 60," he said
at one point. "If they want to send me back, OK. I want to stay at
least two, three more years, and OK."
He said he hoped he could see his youngest
son, 17-year-old David, get his diploma. "That's what I tell my
lawyer: 'Just help me until my three boys finish high school, then
I go,' " Hak said.
But while most returnees are troubled by
the uncertainty and separation of deportation, Hak's fears run
deeper.
"I go to my town, maybe they kill me," he
said. "My town all Khmer Rouge."
 |
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
