Crimes from his past come back to haunt native Cambodian

Sokhoeurn Khol, whose son Ly could be deportedto Cambodia at the end of the month, weeps during a rally in South Philadelphia last night held to focus attention on his plight.

By JULIE SHAW
Philadelphia Daily News
shawj@phillynews.com 215-854-2592

Ly Hov Khol was a young child when he and his family fled the "killing fields" in Cambodia in the late 1970s, a period when 1 to 2 million people died of starvation and disease or were brutally executed under the Khmer Rouge dictatorship.

After spending time in refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines, his family was welcomed to the United States as refugees five years later, when Khol was 10.

While in high school, Khol, who became a legal permanent resident, got involved with a gang.

In January 1995, he acted as a lookout as another gang member entered a house, shot a man dead, and fled with stolen goods. Khol got involved with the gang in another robbery three days later.

Khol pleaded guilty to third-degree murder, robbery and conspiracy in the first case, and to robbery and related offenses in the second. He was sentenced to eight to 26 years in prison.

After serving more than 12 years behind bars and getting paroled in June 2007, Khol, now 35, changed his life. Most recently, he's been volunteering with kids, cleaning up his neighborhood South Philly park and taking care of his mother and younger siblings.

But that's all at peril now.

Because of immigration laws passed in the United States, noncitizens who commit certain crimes are automatically deportable back to their home countries, and there's no hearing before an immigration judge.

Khol's ticking deportation time bomb sounded its alarm last Friday, when he checked in with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, as required.

ICE detained him, and he is now at the York County Detention Center, awaiting deportation to Cambodia, which could come at the end of this month.

"I can't eat, I feeling no good," Khol's mother, Sokhoeurn Khol, 55, said amid tears last night in her South Philadelphia home, shortly before community members held a rally at a nearby park to petition for Khol's release.

"We went through a lot," Khol's sister, Jeanette Khol, 20, said. She realizes that people may not care for her brother, since he committed a crime. But "people do deserve a second chance," she said, wiping tears from her eyes.

"He did his crime, but he also did his time."

If Khol is deported, he would be returning to a country he hardly knows. He doesn't know his relatives there. He can speak some Cambodian, but can't write it. "If he goes there, it's like throwing him to a shark," said Jeanette.

David Seng, a Cambodian-American who works at United Communities Southeast Philadelphia, a nonprofit agency where Khol was volunteering and taking job-training classes, said Kohl wanted to teach youths to not make bad decisions like he did and to stay in school. Seng said growing up here can be hard on immigrant children and teens.

"A lot of them get involved in gangs for protection," he said. "They get picked on in school just because they're different . . . We don't have a lot of role models."

Khol's father wasn't in his life. Jeanette said that her brother, tall but skinny, was picked on at Furness High School.

At last night's rally at 6th and Ritner streets, about 175 people showed up - many Cambodian, including three Buddhist monks.

Mia-lia Kiernan, of the Cambodian Association of Greater Philadelphia, told the crowd: "What happened to Ly, this is happening all over the East Coast now." Six people were just detained by ICE in Lowell, Mass., she said.

Since the United States and Cambodia signed a treaty in 2002, allowing Cambodians to be deported back to their home country, ICE was "deporting a lot of people from the West Coast," she said. "Now, they're coming over to the East Coast."