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Dearly Deported Local Cambodian community rallies around deportees by Gaby Coppola [Illustration by Dan Hertzberg] A 22-year-old Cambodian immigrant living in Providence, Piseth was not actually born in Cambodia. He was born in a refugee camp on the border with Thailand-his parents were fleeing the bloody persecutions of the Khmer Rouge. When the militant communist group came to power in Cambodia at the end of the Vietnam War, Piseth and his family immigrated first to San Francisco, then South Providence. They took refuge in a Southeast Asian community itself struggling against poverty, isolation, and the war-torn history that brought it to the US. |
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At 19, Piseth had graduated high school, fathered a child, and become caught up in the gang violence that flourished in his neighborhood. He served a two-year sentence at the Adult Correctional Institute for aggravated assault and, like many of his friends, had to learn from his mistakes inside the prison walls. Packing his bags at the end of his two-year sentence, he was promptly rearrested by Immigration and Naturalization Service officials on immigration charges, and he spent another year locked up in an INS detention center. Now, because of an agreement between the US and Cambodian governments signed in March of this year, he faces permanent deportation to Cambodia. "How can I go back?" he said. "I only speak a little Khmer. I don't know how to farm. I got an uncle who's never seen me before."
Waiting it out Piseth is one of about 50 Cambodian-Americans here in Providence-and one of over 1,400 across the country-who have been convicted of what the INS calls "aggravated felonies," and are now awaiting deportation. Many are young men in their mid- to late-twenties, the main income earners for their families and fathers of American-born children. Though they are legal residents, they never became citizens, and now they find themselves facing a second round of federal punishment, even though they already served the sentences for their crimes. Leng, who served a total of seven-and-a-half years in state prison and INS detention centers for robbing a drug dealer, said the renewed punishment of deportation is unjust. "Since I got out, I go to school, go to work, stay out of trouble. I'm 28 now. I learned so much. I grew up in prison, my mind is clear. I came out good, I feel that I should be given a second chance," he said. In 1996, President Bill Clinton approved the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act. The INS lobbied to write the act into law, stating that it was necessary to establish "measures to control US borders, protect legal workers through worksite enforcement and remove criminal and other deportable issues." Prior to the act's approval, members of Congress addressed President Clinton to lobby in support of it. Democratic Senator Chris Dodd said, "While I strongly support continued immigration to our nation, there are proper rules and procedures to be adhered to. If you play by the rules and follow the laws of our country then the opportunity to live in America should be available. But, the opportunity to come to America does not give people the right to enter our nation illegally. It does not give them the right to break the law." However, these new regulations affected many Cambodian immigrants who had committed crimes that previously did not qualify them for deportation. The act eliminated judicial discretion in the handling of immigration policy and INS procedure and lowered the bar for determining what crimes merit deportation. Before 1996, a non-citizen convicted of a crime bearing a sentence of five years or more was subject to deportation; the 1996 law lowered the sentence to one year and turned retroactive, meaning it applies to convictions and sentences received before 1996. The new legislation allowed shoplifting, minor drug possession, and drunk driving to be classified as "aggravated felonies," explained Karl Kruger, an immigration lawyer at the International Institute of Rhode Island. "These are sentences they used to give out like water. Now, because Congress changed the rules, it's a huge problem. Every week we see people written up for relatively minor offenses." The signing of the deportation agreement between Cambodia and the US has turned what was an empty threat on the law books into the imminent break-up of Cambodian families and neighborhoods in Providence. Before the agreement, convicted Cambodians were being left in INS detention indefinitely, because the Cambodian government would not accept expatriates. But according to former US Ambassador to Cambodia Kent Wiedemann, the US State Department threatened to withhold visas from Cambodians seeking to enter the US if the Cambodian government would not accept deportees. The Boston Globe also reported that the US is offering financial aid to assist with the reintegration of deportees back into Cambodian society. Sources at the Cambodian Society of Rhode Island have estimated the amount at about $2,000 per person, providing close to $3 million for the Cambodian government when all 1,400 are sent back. Return to sender Leng, now 28, came to the US in 1983. He has only a few fragmented memories of the time he spent in Cambodia. "We were running from the war, that's all I know. You could hear gunfire, so I held on to my mom, crying and stuff 'cause I was scared...American soldiers came and took people. [At that age] it's just another curiosity, you've no idea where you're going. You're just a kid, you don't understand." When he awoke from the daze of the journey and childhood, Leng found himself living in Everett, Massachusetts, with his mom and younger brother. The Khmer Rouge killed his father in Cambodia. In 1987, his mother moved the family to South Providence. Single with two kids and unable to speak a word of English, she received welfare and sent Leng and his brother to school. School for Leng, as for many other children of immigrants, was alienating. "A lot of kids turned to trouble because they couldn't cope with the two cultures," said Molly Suom, vice-president of the Cambodian Society of Rhode Island. "They didn't speak English, other students made fun of them in school, no homework support at home or support at school." The description resonates with Leng as well: "Your parents are poor, you don't have education, so you see people selling drugs, that's all you know. All we wanted to do is try to fit in, peer pressure." In 1990 he left Providence to live with a girlfriend in Lowell, Massachusetts, which has the second largest Cambodian community in the U.S. (California has the first). It was in Lowell that he was arrested for robbing a drug dealer with two friends. He was sentenced to five to eight years for robbery. He was released on parole for good behavior after five years, only to be picked up by INS officials on his way out the prison door and held for two-and-a-half more years. Since the deportation agreement was signed between the US and Cambodia, he finds it hard to invest in turning over a new leaf: "I'm living day by day. I can't plan a future, or hold a relationship, 'cause one day they are gonna come, two or three in the morning, and ship me to Cambodia." While Cambodians are not the only immigrant community to have suffered under the brunt of the 1996 laws, the current political climate in Cambodia makes their fate seem particularly precarious. The country has taken steps towards democracy since the nightmarish dictatorship of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, but the current Prime Minister, Hun Sen, does not represent a clean break from Cambodia's violent past. The organization Human Rights Watch reports that violence and physical repression are still commonplace means of ensuring electoral victory, and incidents of torture and other mistreatment have also been documented in Cambodian prisons. The deportees may not receive a warm welcome from the general public either. The Cambodian press has painted them as "dangerous felons," and many Cambodians harbor resentment towards those who fled to the US during the bloody purges of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s and 1980s. Six people have already been deported to Cambodia, and upon their arrival officials hid them at undisclosed locations for fear of mob violence, though no attacks have been reported. For every action... The response of the Cambodian Community in Providence has been mixed. "You can't get the Cambodian community to do anything until it drops on [its] head," said Molly Soum. Soum recalls trying to get people to come to the State House with her during the welfare reform hearings of 1996, which directly affected the amount of aid Cambodian families would receive. "People say if I go or if I don't go, nothing will change. They don't believe in government change." There are also more conservative members in the Cambodian Community, who feel deportation is a just punishment for Americanized kids who strayed from the values and traditions of their elders. In contrast to some Cambodians' passivity, a year-old organization called the Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM), has been working heavily on the deportation campaign since early July. PrYSM grew out of an alliance between Hope High School students and Brown University students, who protested sub-standard education at the high school and the resulting low level of admissions for Latino students at Brown. The group is not specifically Cambodian-American; rather, it has recruited high school students from various backgrounds to "safeguard their communities and begin building a critical mass," said Sarath Suong, a Cambodian-American and co-founder of PrYSM. According to Ammala Douangsavanh, a PrYSM member and Sociology and Communications major at URI, PrYSM has been able to transcend deep rifts between Southeast Asian groups in Providence, and fulfill the need for a youth movement. "The Laotian Association or the Cambodian Society is like the group of elders back in the home country; the youth organizers have more energy and are more creative about getting the message out." A rally and BBQ organized by PrYSM this summer also drew not only families and friends from the Southeast Asian communities in Providence and Lowell, Massachusetts, but also student activists, philanthropist Alan Sean Feinstein, Democratic mayoral candidate David Cicilline, and other city council candidates, eager to stand in solidarity with their constituents. Ut Doan, a Vietnamese man and Providence resident who attended the rally, said, "I'm here because my friends are Cambodians. My friend did seven years, he's been out for three. He's a good boy, he's done good, and now they send him a letter that he's being sent back to Cambodia." Chan, a Cambodian who fought with the US during the Vietnam War and has been a US citizen for 15 years, said he's happy to see the young men sent back: "I been through a lot, in the army, imprisoned. They [the Cambodian youth] came here to survive, they got school, education, everything." Suong, a co-founder of PrYSM, disagrees. "Cambodian refugees were deposited into pockets of poverty, and the community has been struggling ever since its arrival. To deport them is going to increase poverty in their communities." Deportation could mean not only the loss of family members, but also the loss of history and the chance to heal the scars left by the genocide Cambodian refugees experienced back in Cambodia. "In the refugee community, the older people don't want to talk about it, and the younger people don't know about it," says Suong. "The middle kids who remember are the ones getting deported." The fragmented support and silenced past speaks to the cultural divide between Cambodian parents and their Americanized children, who remember little of what they fled from. GABY COPPOLA B'02.5 has never directed a music video for the Strokes. |