By Marnette Federis June 1, 2018

Lisa Kum has an endless list of tasks every day. The 41-year-old from Cottage Grove, Wisconsin, has a 19-month-old daughter and a high school-aged son. She's also tending to her health after undergoing elbow surgery earlier this year.

Nowadays, she's also busy growing her business that sells refurbished HP printer parts — so that she can sell it and move her family to Cambodia. That's because Kum's husband, Sothy Kum, was deported to Cambodia, a country he left when he was just 2 years old. She plans to shut down the small business they started together four years ago and start over 8,000 miles away.

"It's pretty much been pure hell," she says. "It's very emotional. At the same time, you have to get up every morning and keep going because what other choice do you have?"

Sothy was among 43 immigrants repatriated in early April; the advocacy organization Asian Americans Advancing Justice says it's the largest group of people deported at one time to Cambodia since the country started accepting deportees from the U.S. in the early 2000s.

From fiscal years 2003 through 2016, 750 people were deported to Cambodia in total, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data collected by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Katrina Dizon Mariategue, immigration policy manager with the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC), said in a statement that about 200 Cambodian immigrants are expected to be deported in 2018 alone.



Advocates say deportations of Cambodian immigrants are not only increasing, but also happening faster. It used to take months to deport someone — Sothy's case took almost two years — but now it takes just a few weeks.

"A lot of people were picked up and a week later told they were being deported and people did not have a chance to talk to an attorney," says Anoop Prasad, a lawyer with Asian Americans Advancing Justice.

In December 2017, a judge halted the deportation of about 50 Cambodian immigrants, a move that allowed some of them to talk with lawyers and attempt to argue their case. But the stay, which prevented their deportations, ended in February.

Lisa says her husband spent most of the last two years in immigration detention, almost as long as their young daughter has been alive. Sothy and his family fled Cambodia as refugees and spent years in camps, first in Thailand and then the Philippines. He arrived in the U.S. in 1981, when he was about 6 years old.

Lisa and Sothy met in 2009 when they worked at the same company. In 2014, they decided to quit their jobs and take the financial risk of starting their own business. Sothy allowed an acquaintance to pay him to send marijuana to his house. He was convicted of possession of marijuana with the intent to deliver.

After serving his one-year sentence in 2016, Sothy was again detained by ICE. Though Sothy was a legal permanent resident with a green card, his conviction made him deportable. He remained in ICE detention until August 2017, when he was released just in time to see his daughter turn 1 and to marry Lisa. But by October 2017, Sothy was back in custody.

Historically, the Cambodian government has been hesitant about accepting deportees because many of them left the country at a very young age or were born elsewhere. Many do not have proper documentation to prove they are Cambodian citizens.

Mariategue from SEARAC says many Cambodian immigrants who have deportation orders came to the U.S. as refugees and settled with their families in poor or violent neighborhoods, without much resettlement support. Their parents were focused on everyday survival and sometimes dealing with the trauma of having experienced a war. The civil rights organization has reported that many children have ended up in the criminal justice system without knowing that it could affect their immigration status. In 1996, the U.S. also passed stricter laws that made anyone with a criminal record deportable, part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) signed by President Bill Clinton. But because Cambodia did not accept people deported from the U.S., very few Cambodians were actually deported.

"For the longest time these individuals have been living in the country basically as Americans," says Mariategue. "They just didn't know that there would be deportation consequences to their actions."

In 2002, Cambodia and the U.S. signed an agreement that allowed the country to receive deportees. But the Cambodian government continued to accept anywhere between 30 to fewer than 100 people. In 2017, the U.S. stopped issuing visas for high-ranking Cambodian diplomats to protest that they were not issuing travel documents to people whom the U.S. wanted to deport.

According to the Department of Homeland Security in September 2017, there were "more than 1,900 Cambodian nationals residing in the United States who are subject to a final order of removal, of whom 1,412 have criminal convictions."

Advocates say that pressuring the Cambodian government to accept more detainees is a departure from previous administrations. The Cambodian government wants to change its 2002 memorandum of understanding with the U.S. to look more like agreements with other countries. The Vietnamese government, for example, has an agreement that prevents repatriation of anyone who arrived in the U.S. before 1995, which is meant to protect refugees.

Bombing raids conducted by the U.S. drew Cambodia into the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. The raids galvanized communists in Cambodia, called the Khmer Rouge, who eventually seized the country in 1975. The brutal regime then carried out killings that resulted in the deaths of millions of Cambodians. The U.S. subsequently accepted Cambodian refugees from the mid-1970s through the early 1990s.

A recent Supreme Court ruling could provide some relief to Cambodians who currently have deportation orders. The ruling found that citing a "crime of violence" as the basis for deporting someone is too vague. Holly Cooper, a lawyer with the Immigration Law Clinic at the University of California, Davis, says the ruling could affect a small number of Cambodians with removal orders. Some refugees of the Vietnam War, including Cambodians, receive deportation orders after serving prison sentences for a broad array of felonies — though not always crimes in which they physically harmed someone — that the Department of Homeland Security considers "crimes of violence." The latest ruling could affect their immigration cases, if that crime is the only reason for their deportation.

Sophea Phea, co-founder of 1Love Cambodia, a volunteer-run organization assisting deportees in Phnom Penh, says sending immigrants to a country they fled as children or have not set foot in does not make sense. Phea herself was repatriated to Cambodia in 2011. She was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and came to the U.S. as a refugee at age 1. She was deported after serving prison time for credit card fraud. Phea never became a naturalized citizen because her family was focused on survival.

"Getting a job and all that was just enough," Phea says. "We make mistakes and some of us do get locked up and pay time and do time for our mistakes. I've done that. But for us to be deported to a land we've never been to, to a land that our parents fled from?"

http://theweek.com/articles/774834/deported-cambodia

Sothy Kum's life was destroyed because he broke the law shipping some weed to another consening adult. Henry Kissinger (also an immigrant to America) committed
crimes against humanity and is worth 20 million USD. If there were any real justice he would be deported to Cambodia.

Anthony's Weiner wrote: ↑Sun Jun 17, 2018 2:26 pm Sothy Kum's life was destroyed because he broke the law shipping some weed to another consening adult. Henry Kissinger (also an immigrant to America) committed
crimes against humanity and is worth 20 million USD. If there were any real justice he would be deported to Cambodia.

One's bigger crime don't cancel another's smaller crime.

Steven wrote: ↑Sun Jun 17, 2018 2:36 pm

Anthony's Weiner wrote: ↑Sun Jun 17, 2018 2:26 pm Sothy Kum's life was destroyed because he broke the law shipping some weed to another consening adult. Henry Kissinger (also an immigrant to America) committed
crimes against humanity and is worth 20 million USD. If there were any real justice he would be deported to Cambodia.

One's bigger crime don't cancel another's smaller crime.

How true. And the gentleman from Cambodia has paid the price for his shipping the devil's weed. If there were any real justice Henry Kissinger's life would be destroyed for the murder of thousands of innocent civilians. I did not suggest the gentleman from Cambodia should get off because someone else did something worse. Enjoy your gauloises blue and the fact your girlfriend bathes once every three days.

sucks
but nothing compared to separating kids from their parents that are crossing over from Mexico, almost 2,000 kids in camps

Border agents and child welfare workers are running out of space to shelter children who have been separated from their parents at the U.S. border as part of the Trump administration's new "zero tolerance" policy, according to two U.S. officials and a document obtained by NBC News.

The Trump administration’s practice of separating children from migrant families entering the United States violates their rights and international law, the United Nations human rights office said on Tuesday, urging an immediate halt to the practice.
The administration angrily rejected what it called an ignorant attack by the United Nations human rights office and accused the global organization of hypocrisy.

What happened to

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Anthony's Weiner wrote: ↑Sun Jun 17, 2018 2:51 pm
How true. And the gentleman from Cambodia has paid the price for his shipping the devil's weed.

Yeah

Anthony's Weiner wrote: ↑Sun Jun 17, 2018 2:51 pm
If there were any real justice Henry Kissinger's life would be destroyed for the murder of thousands of innocent civilians.

That's not the subject here.

Anthony's Weiner wrote: ↑Sun Jun 17, 2018 2:51 pm
I did not suggest the gentleman from Cambodia should get off because someone else did something worse.

Don't worry he wont

Anthony's Weiner wrote: ↑Sun Jun 17, 2018 2:51 pm Enjoy your gauloises blue and the fact your girlfriend bathes once every three days.

I'm lucky she bathed the day before yesterday, I'll get at it.

So how would a deportee arriving back in Cambodia apply for a family book a Cambodian ID card , a birth certificate and a drivers licence .

Deporting someone does not solve a problem it just creates more problems ,especially when they have already been punished under the law for their crime.

Steven wrote: ↑Sun Jun 17, 2018 2:36 pm

Anthony's Weiner wrote: ↑Sun Jun 17, 2018 2:26 pm Sothy Kum's life was destroyed because he broke the law shipping some weed to another consening adult. Henry Kissinger (also an immigrant to America) committed
crimes against humanity and is worth 20 million USD. If there were any real justice he would be deported to Cambodia.

One's bigger crime don't cancel another's smaller crime.

It could well depend on the nature and reason for the so called crime:

"Let's assume you've stolen bread to feed your starving family. This was an evil act. Does this mean that you're responsible for that act, that you're at fault? Not necessarily. You're not necessary the person who's responsible. You can be a proximate cause of something without bearing ultimate responsibility. In fact, if you had no choice in the matter, it couldn't be your fault."

"What we mean when we say that someone is responsible for an act is that they could have stopped it easily and didn't. This requires you to have the ability to make a decision."

"Ought implies can't, the local converse of which is that if there is no possibility of behaving otherwise, there is no moral culpability."

"If it's society at large that has driven you to such desperation that you genuinely and literally have no choice, then no single individual did anything wrong, including you." https://www.quora.com/Is-it-wrong-to-st ... ing-family

Kuroneko wrote: ↑Sun Jun 17, 2018 3:26 pm

Steven wrote: ↑Sun Jun 17, 2018 2:36 pm

Anthony's Weiner wrote: ↑Sun Jun 17, 2018 2:26 pm Sothy Kum's life was destroyed because he broke the law shipping some weed to another consening adult. Henry Kissinger (also an immigrant to America) committed
crimes against humanity and is worth 20 million USD. If there were any real justice he would be deported to Cambodia.

One's bigger crime don't cancel another's smaller crime.

It could well depend on the nature and reason for the so called crime:

"Let's assume you've stolen bread to feed your starving family. This was an evil act. Does this mean that you're responsible for that act, that you're at fault? Not necessarily. You're not necessary the person who's responsible. You can be a proximate cause of something without bearing ultimate responsibility. In fact, if you had no choice in the matter, it couldn't be your fault."

"What we mean when we say that someone is responsible for an act is that they could have stopped it easily and didn't. This requires you to have the ability to make a decision."

"Ought implies can't, the local converse of which is that if there is no possibility of behaving otherwise, there is no moral culpability."

"If it's society at large that has driven you to such desperation that you genuinely and literally have no choice, then no single individual did anything wrong, including you." https://www.quora.com/Is-it-wrong-to-st ... ing-family

Doesn't contradict my point, whether it is a crime or not is judged without relation to other crimes.

didnt someone on another thread about khmer guys with white girls? there u go, although i am guessing they did not meet in KoW