By Kit Gillet
McClatchy
Foreign Staff
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia --
Sitting in a dingy bar down a small back alley in the Cambodian
capital, Ros Choun struggled to explain how he ended up here.
“They took my whole life, and there is nothing I can do about it,” he said.
Despite the location and his Cambodian appearance, Choun had spent almost his entire life in the United States. In fact, at 35, he refuses to consider himself anything but American. His family, he recounts, sought refuge in America in the early 1980s after fleeing the genocide and devastation of the Khmer Rouge period, which left Cambodia in ruins and almost 2 million people dead.
“I was 6 months old when I left this country – I’m American – but no one told us if we go to prison we could get deported back to Cambodia,” he said, his eyes downcast and his voice filled with anger.
Since 2002, hundreds of ethnically Cambodian men and women have been deported from the United States to Cambodia in barely recognized fallout from a tough immigration law passed in 1996 during the administration of President Bill Clinton and an agreement, reached after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, that allowed the deportation of any Cambodian convicted of an aggravated felony who hadn’t earned U.S. citizenship.
Few of those who arrived in the U.S. as traumatized refugees in the late 1970s and 1980s realized that asylum and residency were not the same as citizenship.
“I didn’t know anything about any of this until 2011,” said Aun Khoy, 51, a deportee who arrived as a teenager in the U.S. and who was deported back to Cambodia two years ago for a decades-old manslaughter conviction. Read the full article at The Miami Herald.
“They took my whole life, and there is nothing I can do about it,” he said.
Despite the location and his Cambodian appearance, Choun had spent almost his entire life in the United States. In fact, at 35, he refuses to consider himself anything but American. His family, he recounts, sought refuge in America in the early 1980s after fleeing the genocide and devastation of the Khmer Rouge period, which left Cambodia in ruins and almost 2 million people dead.
“I was 6 months old when I left this country – I’m American – but no one told us if we go to prison we could get deported back to Cambodia,” he said, his eyes downcast and his voice filled with anger.
Since 2002, hundreds of ethnically Cambodian men and women have been deported from the United States to Cambodia in barely recognized fallout from a tough immigration law passed in 1996 during the administration of President Bill Clinton and an agreement, reached after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, that allowed the deportation of any Cambodian convicted of an aggravated felony who hadn’t earned U.S. citizenship.
Few of those who arrived in the U.S. as traumatized refugees in the late 1970s and 1980s realized that asylum and residency were not the same as citizenship.
“I didn’t know anything about any of this until 2011,” said Aun Khoy, 51, a deportee who arrived as a teenager in the U.S. and who was deported back to Cambodia two years ago for a decades-old manslaughter conviction. Read the full article at The Miami Herald.
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