cambodia

PJ with friends

Borey (PJ) Ai has served his sentence in the California prison system, but he is not yet a free man. Even as he walks the streets of San Francisco and rejoins his family in Stockton, he can’t loosen up, can’t let his guard down.

“This could be temporary. Any day this could be taken away,” said Ai, who is under the supervision of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and could at any time be deported to Cambodia, a country he has never set foot in. A black GPS ankle monitor sits just above his right Nike, sending his whereabouts to ICE officers.

Jonathan Simon, professor at the UC Berkeley Law School and a member of the Haas Institute’s Diversity and Democracy research cluster, says that most public attention has been focused on deportees who have committed non-violent crimes, but he believes that ex-offenders facing deportation after committing violent crimes deserve consideration if they have genuinely been rehabilitated.

“While his crime was serious and violent, he has undertaken the very hard work of recovery and earned parole at a time when that requires definitive evidence of remorse and rehabilitation,” Simon said in an email.

A few months before he was scheduled to be released, Ai got word that he had an immigration hold. As an undocumented immigrant who had committed a felony, he was likely to be deported. Before this news, he had had no idea that he was a citizen of Cambodia. He doesn’t speak Khmer and has no surviving family in the country. When he left San Quentin, ICE agents were at the gates waiting for him.

“I’m a permanent resident. I didn’t know about my immigration consequences at all until they came to pick me up,” Ai said.

Although Ai, 37, has Cambodian nationality, he was born in a Thai refugee camp in 1981 to parents who were fleeing the Khmer Rouge regime. When he was four, his parents relocated the family to Santa Ana, California, and from there north to Stockton. The area they settled in was marked by violence, and the Ai family spoke no English.

When he was in first grade, Ai saw his seven-year-old cousin and four other children shot to death in the Cleveland Elementary School mass shooting. “I never felt safe in America, but now I was numb to everything,” Ai said in a 2016 interview with San Quentin News.

The violence in Cambodia had traumatized his parents, and both suffered from PTSD. Ai said his father was a gambling and alcohol addict and his mother was overburdened with six kids to raise. Searching for community, Ai started running with a gang in Stockton at age 10. He was a full-fledged gang member by age 12.

Two years later, Ai was trying to impress older friends, and joined them when they asked him to rob a store with them. During the robbery, Ai said he killed the owner of the store. He turned himself in, was tried as an adult, and at age 14, he was sentenced to 25 years to life for second-degree murder with a gun enhancement. Ultimately, Ai served 20 years before he was deemed suitable for parole in 2016.

In prison, Ai became a model of rehabilitation, according to many prison staff. He became a leader in numerous volunteer programs, such as San Quentin’s SQUIRES, which mentors at-risk youth, and facilitated classes to help incarcerated men process trauma through programs like Restoring Our Original True Selves (ROOTS), Guiding Rage Into Power (GRIP) and Kid C.A.T., a program for juvenile offenders. He also started a chapter of Criminal Gang Members Anonymous (CGA) at San Quentin, and co-founded a leadership ambassador class.

“…immigration offenses now account for about half of all federal prosecutions.” THE NEW YORK TIMES Dec 22, 2017

Ai also became a California certified rape and crisis counselor with Bay Area Women Against Rape (Bay-WAR), a domestic violence counselor with GRIP, and a certified addiction treatment counselor. In addition, he appeared with other juvenile lifers in a 2015 documentary called “The Mask You Live In” which addresses the issue of masculinity. In prison, Ai thought of himself as a “community health advocate” and looked forward to continuing his work when he was released from San Quentin.

Ai’s case is not unique. It is one of many in a ramping up of deportations in recent months. In early April, 43 Cambodians, many of whom fled as children, were separated from their families and repatriated to Cambodia. According to The New York Times, ICE tracks 1,900 Cambodians who are subject to orders of removal from the United States. Since 2002, 600 Cambodians who were permanent residents have been sent back to Cambodia.

“A lot of people don’t realize that even if you’re a permanent resident that you can be deported,” Ai’s lawyer Jean Lantz, an immigration specialist, said. “Some of the compelling things about (Ai’s) story do not have legal significance to the immigration board.”

To Professor Simon, these deportations amount to exile. “The real reason to reject deportation in such cases is that doing so is cruel and unusual punishment and disrespects human dignity,” he said. “To exile them from the only social world they have ever really known is to tear asunder the social ties and cultural knowledge that makes a truly human life possible”.

During the 18 months he was in ICE detention, Ai felt powerless, he said. Kept in Sacramento’s Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center, Ai says he was shocked and damaged by the center’s purposeful sleep deprivation tactics and inhospitable surroundings. He didn’t have opportunities to exercise or engage in the work that gave him purpose when at San Quentin. “It was physically and spiritually breaking me down,” he said.

ICE reported “24,476 of the 185,507 inmates in the federal Bureau of Prisons system were not citizens…” THE NEW YORK TIMES Dec. 22, 2017

Ai is on the outside because once his removal order became final, the government could only detain him if his removal was imminent. The government decided to release him until the time comes that ICE can deport him to Cambodia. His community, including the Asian Prisoner Support Committee (APSC), where he works as an intern, has rallied behind him. Although Ai’s community has worked to fight his removal order, they are running out of options. They have appealed the removal by the Immigration Board to a federal appeals court, arguing that his deportation would violate the Convention Against Torture treaty. Ai is also seeking clemency from the governor, which would remove the grounds for his removal from the U.S.

During the war, in order to survive, Ai’s mother and aunt were forced to become a part of the Khmer Rouge regime. He fears that that history would haunt him if he were to be sent to Cambodia, where the wounds of the war in Southeast Asia are still yet to heal.

‘Welcome Home!’ messages cover the Facebook page that Ai has set up for himself. There are messages from family and friends and people he has met along the way, wishing him luck and expressing eagerness to reconnect on the outside. His network is wide and composed of the formerly incarcerated, activists and family.

“This is my country,” PJ said. “I’ve lived here since I was four. I pledged allegiance to the Flag when I was a kid. Sending me back is another punishment. I already did my time.

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The audience cried and laughed with recent graduates of the Restoring Our Original True Selves (ROOTS) program as they told stories of healing generations of intergenerational trauma and jokes.

“For a lot of groups coming from refugee and war-torn situations that have strong disconnections with the generations before them, intergeneration trauma is definitely one of the keys to healing,” ROOTS Facilitator Roger “The Professor” Chung said.

“According to a RAND analysis, every $1 invested in such [inmate] education generates at least $4 in economic return,” reports Fast Company.

ROOTS is an Asian Pacific Islander culture awareness group that focuses on teaching intergenerational trauma, domestic violence, LGBT tolerance and transformative justice.

On Jan. 21, ROOTS held a graduation ceremony at San Quentin State Prison hosted by incarcerated facilitators Phoeun You and Anouthinh “Choy” Pangthong.

Those in the program housed in H-Unit couldn’t attend due to a lockdown.

Graduate Kevin “K” Neang, a 23-year-old from San Jose, shared a story that made many “eyes sweat.”

“The state typically spends $71,000 a year to house an inmate. It costs about $5,000 total to help put one [incarcerated] student through community college”, reports Fast Company.

The ABC (American-Born Cambodian) lived a gang lifestyle that glamorized the streets and Khmer pride while not even knowing what that meant.

“All I knew was that Angelina Jolie loves our country,” Neang said. When the audience laughed, he responded, “What? She even adopted a baby K.”

He learned from ROOTS that he needed to know his history in order to heal.

“It allowed me to go back and call my mom and asked about her history—the Killing Fields,” Neang said. “I told her, ‘I need to know where I came from. You don’t have to hurt alone no more.’”

She visited and opened up about being a little girl run out of her home by Khmer Rouge, seeing kid soldiers killing, blood everywhere, finding her father with his throat slit, hands and feet cut off and chest opened, whole family being executed, and about her being tied to a tree, shoes taken, and beaten. She took off her shoes in the visiting room and showed Neang the scars on her feet.

“I couldn’t take the visit no more,” Neang said. “We were both crying. She told me, ‘Please do not have hatred toward Khmer Rouge because they too were victims.’”

When Neang called her after the visit, she said, “Thank you. I’ve been needing to let that out. I love you.”

Neang added, “That very first moment my mom opened up to me about her life is when I started living my own. Now conversations have begun throughout the family. Now we’re reconnecting with family in Cambodia. ROOTS helped my family get stronger.”

Graduate Si Dang followed with his quest to know his history. ROOTS sparked him to ask his mother about their family history. She told him about growing up in Vietnam during the war. Helicopters fired on her village. She saved a child, but that same child was killed a little while later—survivor’s guilt.

Dang, born in 1975, said his father was in a re-education camp until 1981.

In the United States, they were poor and discriminated against.

In 1989, a car accident claimed the lives of his father, two uncles and a pregnant aunt. Despite everything, his mother raised six children.

“I see courage, sacrifice and hope when I see my mother,” Dang said.

The Hawaiian community lifted spirits back up with a Haka dance performance.

A comedy routine by San Quentin News crossword designer Jonathan Chiu followed. The mixed crowd gave each other permission to laugh at his unique sense of humor.

The evening ended with skits performed by volunteers, graduates and facilitators.

The other graduates were:

Raven Jenkins, Yeng Lee, Wilson Nguyen, Ezequiel Roman, Sou Saechao, Vah Saechao, Satnam Singh, Glen Tufuga, Angel Villafan, Phouc Vong, Jimmy Vue, Tith Ton, Jerome Watts, and Vadim Zakharchenko.

Facilitators also received certificates. They were Rafael Cuevas, You, Pangthong, Moua Vue, Lamar “Maverick” Harrison, Lee Xiong, Chanthon Bun, Eusebeo Gonzales, David B. Le, Joe Hancock, Damon Cooke, and Kamsan Suon.

The day also marked the retirement of You and the return of Nighiep Ké Lam.

You, who had been with ROOTS since Eddie Zheng and Ben Wang started it in 2012, stepped down from the chairman role.

Ké Lam, known as “Mr. San Quentin” for participating in everything from baseball to ROOTS before paroling, visited.

“I cried the first time I drove by here because I miss y’all,” Ké Lam said. “I don’t have that same sense of brotherhood out there that I have here. A lot of people out there are still in prison because they never learned how to deal with their emotional trauma. We need more strong men to be role models, not just for other men, but for kids and people in leadership today.”

Ké Lam gives back to his community as an Asian Prisoners Support Committee reentry coordinator. He helps with getting identification, peer support, counseling, transportation, mediating with parole officers and picking people up from the gate on their release dates.

Many volunteers who came in to teach, learned in the process.

Cambodian volunteer Lina Khoeur added, “I never really had the experience working South East Asian identities. So coming here and learning about the trauma helps me bring that back to my family.”

Volunteer Xanh Tran, a jack of many trades, said, “All of our traumas are passed down from our families. If we don’t heal, the fruit will be rotten. If we can heal ourselves, we don’t have to pass down those rotten apples.”

Tracy Nguyen, who taught the LGBT segment, said, “If we really dissect our lived experiences as LGBT people and incarcerated people, you will find that our oppressions are similar—that is otherization from society, shame within our communities, policies that restrict our freedom. When we get in front of each other to share those stories, the unity and power we can build is part of the pathway to our shared liberation.”

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