Deportations to Cambodia expected to resume after COVID pause. Why Fresno may be targeted
Federal immigration officials could soon resume arrests of Cambodians who hold deportation orders, and Fresno is among the cities that could be targeted, an attorney said Monday.
Many Cambodians who hold deportation orders came to the U.S. as refugees during the U.S. secret bombing on Cambodia during the Vietnam War. More came during the Khmer Rouge genocide a few years later, during which at least 1.7 million Cambodians were murdered by the regime.
Deportations to Cambodia increased dramatically under the Trump administration, but came to a halt during the pandemic. But there are signs indicating that raids could soon hit Cambodian communities and deportations could resume, according to Anoop Prasad, a staff attorney at Advancing Justice - Asian Law Caucus.
It’s difficult to know what specific cities might be targeted for the possible immigration arrests, but Prasad said he expects that parts of the country that are home to large Cambodian populations, like Fresno, Long Beach and Lowell, Mass., “are going to be hit.”
Fresno is home to an estimated 6,718 residents who identify as Cambodian alone or in any combination, according to estimates from the 2015 U.S. Census American Community Survey. The 2015 estimates are the most recent available figures.
“It’s really disappointing that the Biden administration is planning to resume deportations to Cambodia,” he said, especially because many of those facing deportation were displaced from their country due to the U. S. bombing and the genocide. “They survived a brutal genocide that killed a third of the country.”
A spokesperson for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not answer questions earlier this week about the expected arrests or how many Cambodians hold a deportation order. Spokesperson Alethea Smock only said on Monday that the agency “focuses its civil immigration enforcement priorities on the apprehension and removal of noncitizens who pose a threat to our national security, public safety and border security.”
On Thursday, Smock provided additional information and described the information of a potential resumption of Cambodian deportations as “misleading.”
“The spread of misleading information about ICE’s mission and activities does a great disservice to the communities ICE officers are sworn to protect,” she said in a statement to The Bee. “This misinformation erodes the vital trust between community members and law enforcement officers, and may lead to violence, which jeopardizes the safety of ICE officers, as well as citizens and noncitizens alike.”
ICE said it had one Cambodian person in custody as of Feb. 12. The federal agency said it has deported one Cambodian individual, so far in fiscal year 2022, which began Oct. 1. It deported one Cambodian individual in fiscal year 2021.
Immigration arrests targeting Cambodians looming
One way Prasad’s organization is able to tell if immigration arrests are planned is when it starts to “see a pattern of people being asked to report to ICE around the same time, with very little notice,” he said. People typically are required to check-in with ICE once a year.
Another more “concrete way” of knowing if ICE arrests are imminent, he said, is through advance notice by ICE.
“In 2017, we filed a nationwide class action lawsuit in response to Cambodian raids, and an injunction was put in place which required ICE to provide a written advance notice to people who were part of the class before ICE arrested them,” he told The Bee. “Last week, ICE issued one of these notices.”
The national Southeast Asia Deportation Defense Network (SEADDN) in a Tuesday statement said it has also learned ICE issued a “notice for arrest” to a Cambodian person who holds a deportation order, and fears the federal agency could “begin arresting additional people as soon as this week.” It wasn’t immediately known where the person who received the notice lives.
SEADDN said these actions are in contradiction to the commitment made by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
“When threatened with deportations, Southeast Asian American communities face undue fear and uncertainty around their future and their families’ futures,” the network said in the statement. “Deportations are state violence and another facet of anti-Asian hate.”
Cambodians with deportation orders came to U.S. as refugees
Many Cambodian refugees arrived in the U.S. as infants and children. Their families were resettled in neighborhoods, including some with high poverty rates and gang violence, such as Fresno and Long Beach, Prasad said. Then some of them, as a result of actions in their teens years or early 20s, ended up in the criminal justice system.
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 made more immigrants, including those living in the country legally, eligible for deportation if convicted of certain crimes.
Many people who held a deportation order to Cambodia weren’t previously deported because the Southeast Asian country wasn’t accepting deportees for several reasons. The U.S. didn’t have a repatriation agreement with Cambodia for a long time and many people facing deportation didn’t have documents showing they were from Cambodia.
Then deportations slowly began after a repatriation agreement was reached in 2002. The Cambodian government wasn’t cooperative and in 2016 it temporarily stopped accepting deportees. But in 2017, the Trump administration issued visa sanctions on Cambodia to pressure the country to take back deportees, and mass raids occurred in cities with large Cambodian populations.
Similar sanctions followed in other countries, such as Laos. The U.S. partially lifted visa sanctions on Laos last week, but full sanctions remain in place for Cambodia.
Immigration raids in Cambodian communities across the U.S. continued until February 2020, and deportations have been on hold since then, Prasad said. Advocates have been asking the Biden administration to lift the sanctions on Cambodia, he said, and have also been calling for the reparation agreement between both countries to be renegotiated to reach a more “humane” policy.
Cambodia is run by an authoritarian government that’s riddled with deep corruption. Its prime minister, Hun Sen, was a Khmer Rouge soldier, and has been in power since 1985. He has imprisoned many activists who expose corruption as well as opposition political leaders under false pretenses.
Sen and his ruling party wanted to remain in power and had the leader of the opposition party arrested on treason charges leading up to the national elections in 2018. Then a Supreme Court judge, who is close to Sen and a high-ranking member in his ruling party, dissolved the entire opposition party before the elections, forcing many other opposition leaders to go into exile. That made way for the ruling party to continue to take control of the country it has led for decades under its oppressive regime. The U.S. and the E.U. don’t recognize the 2018 elections as legitimate.
The ruling party also had a major crackdown on independent media in the country.
As the ruling government, their families and friends continue to hold power, the rest of the country remains in high poverty, with poor schools and a severely ill-equipped health care system. Cambodia remains one of the most corrupted and poorest countries in the world.
The situation that Cambodian deportees face is “devastating,” Prasad said. Many of them were born in refugee camps and have never set a foot in Cambodia. Many of them don’t speak the language, Khmer.
“They face an enormous amount of poverty, depression, suicide, alcohol abuse,” Prasad said. “You see people dying of really treatable things like diabetes because folks can’t afford insulin... And you see people suffering from the pain of being separated from their family and really having no hope of coming back home.”
Deportations of Cambodians have already separated families in Fresno in recent years.
There are resources and support that community members can tap into if they hold a deportation order, Prasad said. There’s a national hotline, where community members can speak to an immigration attorney for free.
Call or text the Asian Law Caucus hotline at 415-952-0413. Or access a list of resources and contacts at SEARAC.org
This story was originally published February 17, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
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