Old drug plea may send Longview woman to land she’s never visited [The deportation of another Khmerican?]

Tony Lystra / The Daily News | Posted: Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Vanny Vath has never been to Cambodia.

She doesn’t speak the language and has no known family there.

Yet, the U.S. government may soon deport her to the country because she admitted to selling heroin in Cowlitz County 14 years ago, her attorneys said.

Judge Stephen Warning denied on Tuesday Vath’s motion to withdraw her 1998 guilty plea for distributing heroin during an emergency hearing in Cowlitz County Superior Court. That means Vath, 33, of Longview, may soon say goodbye to her four children, the youngest of which is 3, then board a plane bound for a yet-unspecified Cambodian city, said her Seattle attorney, Matthew Adams.

“It’s really disappointing,” Adams said of Tuesday’s ruling. “It’s just, I think, mind-boggling for her. There’s a large sense of desperation and despair, knowing she’s on the verge of being separated from her family, from her home. This could be the last time she sees her children.”

Vath, a Cambodian citizen, has lived all her life in the U.S. as a “lawful permanent resident,” Adams said. Her family fled Cambodia’s brutal Khmer Rouge government and came to the U.S. in 1979. Vath, he said, was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and was only 6 months old when she came to the U.S.

She is now awaiting deportation in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, where she has been held for about a month. An ICE spokesman declined to comment on the case Tuesday, citing privacy concerns.

In 1997, when she was 18, Vath pleaded guilty to drug possession. Then, the following year, she again pleaded guilty to a heroin distribution charge following a drug task force sting. Vath was sentenced to 34 months in prison.

Adams, who works for a nonprofit group called the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, said the drug-dealing charge, an aggravated felony, means that Vath must be automatically returned to her country of origin under U.S. immigration law. She cannot argue her case before an immigration judge, he said.

Vath was originally scheduled to be deported in 2000, Adams said, but diplomatic relations were chilly between the U.S. and Cambodia, and Cambodia wasn’t willing at the time to accept deportees from the U.S.

“It’s only now that Cambodia has agreed to accept her,” he said.

Vath’s family lived on the East Coast from 1979 to 1984, according to an obituary for her father, Khlee Vath, who died in 2001. The family moved to Cowlitz County in 1989. Vanny Vath, according to the obituary, is the sister of Bunny Vath, whom police suspected of being a highly-ranked gang member. Bunny Vath survived a 1997 South Kelso drive-by shooting and is now serving a 28-month prison sentence for selling cocaine.

On Tuesday, Adams said Vanny Vath has since “grown up” and has “gotten over her drug problem.” Still, he said, she was arrested with her boyfriend in Clark County in 2010 on a drug-related charge. Prosecutors did not pursue charges against Vath, but her boyfriend was convicted, Adams said.

Vath has four children between the ages of 3 and 18, Adams said. The younger children, he said, will live with Vath’s mother and sisters in Longview if she is deported. Adams said it’s unclear whether the Cambodian government would allow Vath to bring her children with her, but it doesn’t matter.

“Given that she has nothing there, she wouldn’t take her children just to make (them) homeless on the street,” he said.

Attorneys scheduled a rushed hearing in Cowlitz County Superior Court on Tuesday because they expected Vanny Vath may be deported any day.

“I think we really need to do this fast,” Longview attorney James Morgan, who also is representing Vath, told the court.

Morgan argued that Vath should be allowed to withdraw her 1998 guilty plea because her defense attorney at the time didn’t warn her that she could be deported if she pleaded guilty. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that such notifications are mandatory, he said.

However, deputy prosecutor David Phelan said Vath had already been scheduled for deportation because of her 1997 drug possession charge. Vath, he said, should have known she would be kicked out of the country for drug dealing as well. In fact, he said, the only reason she wasn’t deported in 1997 is that Cambodia wasn’t willing to accept her at the time.

Phelan also pointed out that it’s been so long since Vath’s arrest that the case file has been destroyed, which is standard procedure. It would be almost impossible to retry the case, he said.

In denying Vath’s request, Judge Warning agreed with Phelan that Vath should have known she would face deportation. He also cited case law giving Vath only a year to withdraw her plea.

“There are arguments about whether this makes sense from an immigration standpoint, but that’s not my issue,” Warning said.

Adams disputed Phelan’s claim that Vath was scheduled for deportation following her guilty plea for drug possession. The deportation proceedings only began after the 1998 conviction for heroin dealing, he said. The distinction matters because she couldn’t have known the stakes were so high when she pleaded guilty to the latter charge, he said.

Had Vath’s drug-dealing plea been withdrawn, she would no longer have an aggravated felony conviction on her record and, under immigration law, she could have gone before a federal immigration judge and explained her situation, Adams said.

Now, Adams said, he will appeal Warning’s ruling to the state Court of Appeals — and hope Vath doesn’t get deported before that court takes up the case.

“It could happen in matter of days or it could happen in a matter of months,” he said.