Despite criminal convictions, successive Republican and Democratic administrations have shielded them from deportation since the war’s end decades ago.
Trump administration detains Vietnamese who came as refugees after war
After the Vietnam War ended 50 years ago, Republican and Democratic administrations shielded refugees from deportation. Donald Trump is changing that.
For over a month, a 43-year-old Vietnamese man has been sitting in a Louisiana detention center waiting to see whether he will be deported to a country he fled as a boy.
Huy Quoc Phan, who has an American wife and kids, is among thousands of people who arrived as refugees after the end of the Vietnam War and are now being targeted for removal.
The Alabama warehouse worker served 15 years in prison for his involvement in a robbery that led to a shopkeeper’s death.
His wife of six years, Amy, 39, said she knew of the crime, which took place when he was 17.
“I didn’t hold it against him when I met him,” she said. “I think people should be given second chances.”
For decades, both Republican and Democratic administrations agreed ‒ at least for immigrants from Vietnam, a country the United States left in disgrace five decades years ago. Although immigrants from other countries were routinely deported after serving time for crimes, the Vietnamese were allowed to stay.
Not anymore.
In his first administration, President Donald Trump sought to end that special treatment. Four months into his second term, he has stepped up efforts to deport as many immigrants as possible, including Vietnamese.
Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said people like Phan deserve to be deported because of their criminal past.
“Under President Trump and (DHS Secretary Kristi) Noem’s leadership, ICE is continuing to protect Americans by detaining and removing criminal aliens,” McLaughlin said in an emailed statement.
Protections as refugees
Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, these changes are leaving thousands of Vietnamese refugees like Phan in limbo, said Quyen Mai, executive director of the California-based nonprofit Vietnamese American Organization.
“We feel we got abandoned again,” he said.
As of late May, the Trump administration had tried to remove at least one Vietnamese man to South Sudan, along with other migrants. On May 27, observers noted that at least one deportation flight appeared to have landed in Hanoi.
Vietnam historically has not accepted deportations from the United States, except for a period during Trump’s first administration. President Joe Biden largely halted such deportations when he came into office.
Neither the Trump administration nor the Vietnamese government responded to questions about any changes to agreements for detaining Vietnamese immigrants or repatriating deportees.
Although it’s not clear how many Vietnamese immigrants will be affected, one Atlanta-based immigration attorney already represents more than a dozen now in detention. Through agreements between the nations, around 8,600 Vietnamese immigrants have been shielded from deportation despite prior convictions and removal orders, said Lee Ann Felder-Heim, an immigrant rights staff attorney at the San Francisco-based nonprofit Asian Law Caucus.
After Black April in 1975, the first wave of 125,000 people fleeing Vietnam arrived in the United States. By 2000, nearly a million Vietnamese had settled here, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Most became permanent residents.
“The U.S. government made a commitment to the people admitted as refugees that they would be protected,” said Jana Lipman, a professor of history at Tulane University who studies Vietnamese refugee populations.
Phan is among those who arrived as refugees before 1995, when the United States and Vietnam re-established relations 20 years after the end of the war.
A lawsuit settled in 2021 has prevented extended detention for these early immigrants. The Biden administration limited their removal. The Trump administration now seeks to restart deportations.
“This is a huge impediment to the president’s deportation program,” said Andrew Arthur, resident law and policy fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a right-leaning think tank.
Vietnam has been among the countries most “recalcitrant” to accept deportees, he added. And Trump’s hardline removal policy looks forward rather than back to a a 50-year-old war, he said.
Escape by boat
Phan last saw Vietnam from a boat.
He was born in 1982 to two farmers in Bến Tre, an agricultural province in southern Vietnam’s Mekong Delta.
His relatives, including his grandfather, fought for militias aligned with American-backed South Vietnam, according to his aunt’s refugee application, which USA TODAY reviewed. They were sent to the new communist government’s re-education prison camps and forced to do hard labor. Vietnamese officials seized part of their family’s land.
In the war-torn country, his parents made the decision to send a 7-year-old Phan with his aunt, Le Thi Phan, then 25, and her daughter, who was 3. After fleeing by boat, in 1989, they arrived in a Malaysian refugee camp, records showed.
Two years later, American immigration officials accepted Phan and his relatives as refugees.
He distinctly remembers his first sight of America.
“The U.S. lit up like a Christmas tree,” he told USA TODAY in a phone interview from a detention center. “It was magical.”
They settled in metropolitan Atlanta.
He learned English, developing a Southern twang, and became his family’s translator. He took care of two younger cousins.
Bad choices and redemption
Phan dropped out of school in 9th grade and went to live with other Vietnamese boys and men. He said he looked up to the wrong people.
On July 3, 1999, then 17 and short on rent money, he and four others decided to rob a Vietnamese cafe. Detectives described them as customers who formed an “ad-hoc robbing crew.”
Several of the others beat the shopkeeper to death trying to get him to give up the money, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported at the time.
Phan was sentenced as an adult and served nearly 15 years in Georgia prison, records show. An immigration judge issued a final removal order in 2002, while he was in prison. He received his GED and technical training certificates while behind bars.
Since his release, in 2015, his family said he’s had no run-ins with law enforcement.
Phan said he worked seven days a week at Little Caesar’s and in a nail salon until he met Amy on an online dating site. He got a stable job at a warehouse so he could spend more time with her.
Their family, now with a toddler, moved to Alabama last year to be closer to Amy’s sister, before she died in February.
Arrest and detention
On April 14, while waiting for his 11-year-old stepson and 3-year-old son to wake up, he heard a knock on the door. At the start of spring break, he thought his stepson’s friends had come to start playing early.
Instead, it was ICE agents and U.S. Marshals, who put him in handcuffs. Amy awoke to her husband calling out from the living room, where she saw several agents around her husband in handcuffs.
Phan was confused. His work authorization is valid through September. They brought up his teenage conviction.
“I did something wrong in the past, but nothing wrong now,” Phan said.
For two days, his wife couldn’t find him. He finally got a minute-long call to tell her he was headed to the LaSalle Detention Center, in Jena, Louisiana, where the Trump administration has sent other detainees, including former Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil.
In a TikTok video with over 940,000 views, Amy begged, “Give me my husband back.”
On a worn piece of paper addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” his supervisor and nearly a dozen of his coworkers called Phan “an honorable individual, a leader for the company, and a valuable member of the community.” They hoped the court took their letter into consideration.
He received documents ordering him to leave the country, but he can’t comply with those orders while he’s in ICE custody.
Amy, who hasn’t been on a plane since she was a baby, now wonders what it might be like to live in Vietnam.
Eduardo Cuevas is based in New York City. Reach him by email at [email protected] or on Signal at emcuevas.01.