The US took in thousands of Cambodian refugees. Now it’s sending some back – in chains

BY THE TIME Trip and Youngster broke into the dingy flat in Phnom Penh, seeking missing pal Ver Chan, the smell of misery had thickened into decay. A full day, maybe two, had passed since Chan, 34, who grew up in California, scribbled a note to his family, knotted a rope around his neck and ended his tormented life in Cambodia. It took the pair another day to rustle up enough cash from friends for the cremation. Chan was carried in a simple wooden casket. Then, cloth tied around their faces because of the stench, six of them hefted the stiff, blanket-wrapped body of Chan onto the flames.

Each had the same thought: “Man, it could be me in that box.” It could indeed. Trip, Youngster, Chan and more than 180 other young men represent one of the strangest sidebars to America’s war on terror and its obsession with homeland security. All of them were born in Cambodia or in Thai refugee camps during or after the horrors of the Khmer Rouge rule of 1975-79. Their families were the luckiest of Cambodians: they managed to migrate to the safety of the United States.

Then fate doubled back on some of the children. In 1996, the US passed tough deportation laws designed to clear American jails of illegal aliens. After 9/11, Washington started applying the law with rigor, deporting people who broke even minor laws and shipping them home without consideration of age, mental state or family situation. The new targets included thousands of refugees from Southeast Asia – Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians – who had legally entered the US and didn’t consider Indochina home at all.

So far, 188 raised-in-the-USA Khmer men (and one woman) have been expelled to Cambodia. Another 1,500 could yet face the same fate. They include those who committed crimes as juveniles, served their time and moved on. A construction worker in Texas was deported for public urination. Others include a 79-year-old man and many with mental illnesses.

“This is the only place in the world where you have this situation,” notes Bill Herod, an American aid worker in Cambodia who has been helping with resettlement since the first deportees arrived. “What’s goofy is these are people who grew up in the United States. By any measure of common sense or fairness, they are Americans and don’t belong here.”

“The young Khmericans,” as they have been dubbed, stand out in every way in Cambodia. Arms and chests covered in tattoos, they wear baggy clothes, ride massive motorbikes and hang in local hip-hop clubs. Locals call them DJs, a reference to their loud rap music, hood-heavy slang – their gangsta personas.

Bunreas Pin, or Boomer, a rapper from Stockton, California, spent his whole life in America, except three months as a toddler in a Thai refugee camp. In 2003, he was flown back to Phnom Penh – in chains. “It was a total, total shock,” he says of his first glimpse of Cambodia. His exodus inspired his recent rap album: “Straight Refugeez.” The refrain of the title song sums up their status: “We’re America’s nightmare.”

Like most deportees, Boomer was a gang member in the US. All were criminals. None had ever secured US citizenship, merely relying on their green cards.

Many served prison time only to find that the tough new American immigration rules were being applied retroactively to long-ago misdeeds – and this time there would be no chance of parole or rehabilitation, ever.

They were being sentenced to life in Cambodia. “It’s like you do the time, and then do it all over again,” says Boomer, who readily concedes his mistakes: spraying graffiti, running with a bad crowd, keeping guns. All this was while he was a teen. “I was just a kid,” he notes. After two years in jail, “I figured I’d get out and start all over.” Instead, like the rest, he ponders his penance daily.

“I felt like I was tricked,” adds Dicer, who grew up in Utah, Texas and California. Deportation wasn’t even a possibility when he went to court. “This is like a cruel and unusual punishment,” he says after four years in Cambodia. “America is home. We don’t belong here.”

THE WELCOME IS anything but warm for the deportees at the airport in Phnom Penh, where groups of 10-12 men arrive periodically but unpredictably. Shackled on the flight, they are turned over to Cambodian authorities – essentially dumped cold turkey in one of the world’s poorest and most corrupt countries.

“They are generally scared, in shock,” says Herod, who has been meeting the deportees since July 2002. As the first group was in the air, attorneys fighting the deportations in the US called for help. He promised to meet them. “There was no program in place, no plan for resettlement, nothing.”

Deportees say they were greeted by guards who shook them down for “entry fees.” Intimidated, alone in a land they knew only from nightmarish tales of relatives, some were coerced out of hundreds of dollars.

Herod began knocking on doors, begging for resettlement funding. As an American in Cambodia since 1994, Herod saw this as one more wrong on a very long list. A conscientious objector during the US war in Vietnam, he has been involved with Southeast Asian charities ever since.

He patched together a program to sponsor new arrivals and provide supplies and transitional housing.

“It was very basic,” he concedes. “At the beginning we worked out of a guesthouse. A guy would arrive with a serious drug problem and there was nothing we could do but lock him in a room with a TV and say, ‘Just say no.’”

As the number of deportees increased, so did news coverage, prompting some American aid. “They were shamed into it,” says one deportee. A three-year grant of $800,000 was announced in September 2005 by USAID that led to the launch of the Returnee Integration Support Program (RISP).

A community center for the deportees was established with computer training and job placement help. George Ellis, an American psychologist who had worked in Kosovo and Guatemala, came to Cambodia in October 2005 to offer counseling. Besides a transitional facility offering three-month stays, there was another house for those with special needs, like mental problems.

“There are really no services for the mentally ill in Cambodia,” Ellis explains. “Basically, all these guys are traumatized – or doubly traumatized. Just getting to America involved all kinds of trauma for them. Then, they are told the place they live isn’t where they belong. They are not only deported, they are told they can never come back, that they aren’t American. It’s a terrible, terrible blow to them.”

“THIS IS A cyclical thing in US history,” says Rachel Rosenbaum, a lawyer specializing in deportation issues at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College. “Look back a century or more and immigrants have repeatedly been the scapegoat.”

Cambodian refugees, she says, got caught up in reforms dating to 1996, when new laws targeted hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants mired in the US criminal system. To speed deportations, the new codes removed appeals, hearings, reconsideration. Basically, any foreign national in jail for a felony, or convicted of one, could be deported quickly.

The Cambodians presented a quandary for a variety of reasons. First off, they weren’t illegal immigrants but refugees invited to America. A little more than 200,000 Cambodians reside in the US, according to a recent census. An estimated three-fourths came after the US bombing campaign and fall of the country to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, according to a study by Bill Ong Hing, professor of Law and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis.

Secondly, international law obliges countries to accept repatriation of their nationals, but the Cambodians – along with Laotians and Vietnamese – are an exception. These people were accepted to the US as “stateless” refugees. Cambodia didn’t consider them citizens and didn’t want them back. Washington had to draw up special agreements to legitimize the deportations.

Extreme pressure was applied on Cambodia to sign the deal, says Roland Eng, who was Cambodia’s ambassador to Washington when the agreement was negotiated in 2002. “I was totally opposed to this. The US told us that there would be no more visas issued and our kids couldn’t go to school in America. They forced the deal on us.” Laos and Vietnam refused to sign at the time, although Vietnam finally accepted an agreement this year.

Many see it as yet another low-point in US foreign policy, all the more shameful considering America’s role in the strife that made these people refugees. “This is worse than just a failure of US refugee policy,” notes Herod. “To just ship all these gang members here, to a country ill-equipped to handle them. I worry the US is creating real long-term problems for Cambodia, not to mention failing these guys it took in in the first place.”

Bradford concurs: “Some of these guys are bad to the bone and not likely to change. But they were kids when they went to America. Cambodia didn’t create these guys, or their problems, America did.”

US officials in Cambodia declined to discuss the deportations, saying it was an immigration matter. However, one senior US official in Phnom Penh confided: “It’s morally reprehensible.”

NEARLY SIX YEARS have passed since the first child refugees were sent back to Cambodia. Some hit the ground running, with the support of family members, and made new lives – perhaps 10 to 20 percent, says Ellis.

Another 30 percent struggle to get by. Most go through a wild phase upon arrival, hitting the clubs and partying hard. Drugs are cheap and plentiful in Cambodia. “Chicks love us,” notes Boomer. For guys who have spent years locked up in jail, freedom in Cambodia can be a real high.

Then comes the crash. “Oh yeah, that’s the traumatized stage,” Boomer says. “Everyone goes through it. A lot of guys stall, think things will change and this will be over. But you have to accept it and get on.”

Many never come to terms with the new reality, or fall through the cracks, just as they did in the US. Even decades after arriving in the US, Cambodian immigrants earn significantly less money than the national norm or other Asian immigrants, according to Professor Hing. The reasons aren’t entirely clear, but Cambodians tended to be poorer and less skilled.

Plus, they were fleeing perhaps the worst genocide the world has seen. An October 2006 study in American Journal of Public Health noted astronomically high rates of depression and post-trauma stress among former Cambodian refugees, even decades on.

How many deportees suffer from the same symptoms is anyone’s guess. Ellis won’t be making any assessment. He left Cambodia last year after the US ended funding for resettlement a year earlier than promised.

“We had to cut staff drastically and close the transitional house,” says Sonec Tan, who worked for RISP and stayed on with a program run by deportees like himself. Among those tossed out on the street when the transitional house closed was suicide victim Ver Chan.

Tan shows me around the small shelter in a bad part of Phnom Penh, all they can afford on a budget of $4,000 per month. In the backyard is a shack made of scrap wood, home of Cowboy, who Tan says belongs in a mental ward. “If we closed this place down, he’d be dead.”

Some deportees admit to a big irony: being sent back may have saved their lives. “If I was back in the US, I’d either be in jail or dead,” says Boomer.

“This is like a new chance,” explains Sarath Vong, who was a cousin of Chan. “He was getting deep into drugs,” Vong says. “You gotta move on. It’s like playing cards. You just cannot keep playing the same cards. You gotta change.”

Leaving the gangs – and gang violence – in the US was the best break that ever happened to him. Now, 38, Chan has a job for the first time in his life. He married a local girl last month. Dicer, 40, did the same. His family from the US arranged it. “They wanted me to settle in.”

Yet, every single one of them – Boomer, Vong, Dicer – would trade it all for what they had and lost, what was promised, then taken away. “If I could go back?” Vong says, “In a minute! America is home.”