By Amy-Xiaoshi DePapaola, AsAmNews Contributor
A D.C.-based coalition recently challenged ICE over its conduct and arrest of more than 30 Cambodian Americans.
Asian American advocacy groups had denounced the deportation of more than 30 Cambodian Americans on Jan. 13, AsAmNews reported. Said individuals were deported on a single flight from Texas’s Prairieland Detention Center, according to Kham Moua of Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC).
SEARAC was one of the groups that condemned ICE, along with Americans Advancing Justice, Asian Prisoner Support Committee, Southeast Asian Freedom Network, and Vietnamese Anti-Deportation Network.
“Removals for Cambodians and all nationalities are directly proportionate to their respective illegal entries into the United States and represent the result of judicious immigration removal proceedings,” an ICE spokeswoman told AsAmNews in a previous story.
But SEARAC and its partners objected to the statement, calling it “blatantly and objectively false information.”
“Let’s be clear — regardless of their citizenship status, separating
people from their families and forcing their deportation is inhumane and unjust,” the Southeast Asian Anti-Deportation Network said in an email.
“However, in actuality, these individuals entered the United States as refugees and were lawful permanent residents. ICE’s inaccurate conflation demonstrates its total disregard for the immigrant communities they devastate.”
In turn, ICE fired back in an email, saying, “…each of these persons was removed from the U.S. in full accordance with federal law,” due to their being “unlawfully present and subject to removal under federal law
after receiving all appropriate legal process.”
“Persons that spread misinformation about ICE do a disservice to the
communities they claim to represent,” said Bryan D. Cox, ICE acting press secretary.
In the conclusion of the email, Cox challenged the coalition to name a “specific case … with any specific examples of an alleged improper removal.”
In turn, SEARAC criticized the agency’s “total lack of compassion toward the immigrant communities and families it tears apart,” and refuted complying with the law as ethically-sound, listing U.S. historical events such as slavery and internment.
“The Trump Administration’s mass deportation of immigrant and refugee communities is another dark moment in our history. That’s why we as Asian American activists and advocates support the New Way Forward Act,” said Elaine Sanchez Wilson, SEARAC director of communications and development, in an email to AsAmNews.
The New Way Forward Act would give all immigrants due process, including adding a statute of limitations for deportability and opening ways for some deportees to come back to their families in the U.S. It is supported by SEARAC, and was introduced by U.S. House Reps. Chuy Garcia (D-Ill.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Karen Bass (D-Calif.), and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.).
The bill has not yet been passed in Congress, according to government documentation.
In her email, Sanchez Wilson cited the case of Cambodian American Sok Khoeun Loeun as an example of “improper conduct” by ICE.
Sok and his family came to the U.S. as refugees after fleeing the Khmer Rouge, and lived in California until 2015, when deportation proceedings against Sok — now a single father with three children — began, due to him being convicted of a “years old drug felony.”
Rather than spending an indeterminate amount of time in ICE custody, Sok resigned to his deportation to Cambodia with a plan to send his children money in the U.S. For five years, Sok struggled with adjusting to life in a country he had not lived in since infancy.
However, during a deportees’ workshop, Sok “learned for the first time that he had automatically become a US citizen at the age of 12 through his mother and never should have been deported,” the site Right To Reunite says. It is currently raising funds for Sok to return to the U.S.
ICE did not respond to SEARAC’s comment.
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