San Quentin News

Written By Incarcerated - Advancing Social Justice

Former inmate Tung Nguyen faces a deportation order

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A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity was knocking on Tung Nguyen’s door during a disturbance at a hip-hop concert at San Quentin State Prison in 2006.

While conducting a tour of the prison for about 50 non- profit workers and volunteers, a riot broke out between Black and Hispanic inmates. Ac- cording to Nguyen’s interview for OC Weekly, correctional officers ordered all inmates on the ground, but Nguyen ignored their commands. He and his fellow inmate tour guides formed a line in front of the terrified visitors to protect them from the riot.

“Once we formed a line, I could see the fear in the [visitors’] eyes,” said Nguyen. “We ushered them to safety.” In a debriefing after the riot, the officers said that “we did a good job maintaining the peace,” Nguyen recalled.

In 2010, four years later, Governor Brown gave Nguyen a 2011 parole date for his heroic act.

Born a year after the fall of Saigon in 1976, Nguyen came to the U.S. in the early 1990s. Ostracized by class- mates, who called him a “Nip,” Nguyen turned into prime recruiting material for a Vietnamese gang for protection. In 1993, at age 16, one of Nguyen’s fellow gang members fatally stabbed someone over an unpaid debt. Accused of first-degree murder and robbery alongside his associates, Nguyen did not think the charges would result in convictions, but the jury found him guilty. He received a sentence of 25 years to life.

Later when Nguyen was released on parole, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) waited outside San Quentin to arrest him. Nguyen was confined inside a federal building in San Francisco for two weeks. As a Vietnamese refugee, Nguyen had lost his U.S. Permanent Residency Status – his green card – because of his conviction.

Initially, Nguyen was protected from deportation due to a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the U.S. and Vietnamese governments. The agreement vowed to harbor Vietnam War refugees such as Nguyen, who entered the U.S. before 1995.

However, this protected condition changed with the election of Donald Trump. In 2017, ICE started to arrest and detain Vietnamese refugees with criminal convictions. President Trump has since begun seeking to renegotiate the MOU to deport more people to Vietnam, pre- 1995 or not.

Nguyen’s act of heroism at San Quentin once again saved him from deportation. Nguyen applied to then Gov. Jerry Brown for a pardon, and in 2018, on the day before Thanksgiving, he received the pardon. It was granted partly because of his courageous act during the riot. The pardon effectively erased his conviction, protecting Nguyen from ICE’s target list.

After his release from prison, Nguyen has lived an exemplary life. He success- fully advocated for early parole hearings in SB260. He also founded the Asian and Pacific Islanders Re-Entry of Orange County (APIROC). After 2017, he shifted his fo- cus to immigration in cases that affected the Vietnamese community.

Vietnamese citizens who have run into problems with the law flooded him with calls. Many had entered the U.S. prior to 1995, the period protected by the MOU.

Nguyen says this has turned him into a case manager for such persons. He offers advice, explains to them how they can help themselves and describes to them the processes they may encounter.

Nguyen’s advocacy does not end here. In December, 2018, he helped organize a protest on the streets of Little Saigon, a Vietnamese area in Orange County.

That same month, “Congressman Alan Lowenthal (D- Long Beach) led a coalition of 26 House members, who expressed dismay with the administration’s agenda,” re- ported the OC Weekly. A Dec. 13 letter signed by Lowenthal and his supporters read, “We strongly oppose any renegotiation of the MOU that strips the current protections afford- ed to Vietnamese refugees, including the exclusion from the agreement of pre-1995 im- migrants and the humanitarian consideration provided to all others.”

In order to get MOU codified into law, Representative Lowenthal is counting on the 2020 election to change the balance of power in Washington, D.C. He believes any codifying of this issue while the administration is trying to renegotiate the terms of MOU will be unlikely to succeed.

Lowenthal considers comprehensive immigration reform as the issue of greater importance for the next administration, according to The OC Weekly.

Out of prison but not yet free of ICE

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PJ with friends

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.

Deportation Crimes Explained

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http://sanquentinnews.com/daca-repeal-is-a-nightmare-for-dreamers/

Black immigrants in fear of deportation

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As federal raids become a daily occurrence, Black immigrants are living in fear. They undergo more scrutiny than other migrant groups across the nation — the result: one in five face deportation, according to a recent Pew Trust article.

“We’re worried,” said Patrice Lawrence, policy coordinator for the UndocuBlack Network. “The (Trump administration is) putting people’s hearts and minds in limbo. They’ve got a deportation machine geared up and ready to go.”

One thing Black immigrants find out while growing up in America is that they are one thing: Black. The article notes that they face the same challenges as native-born African-Americans, from housing discrimination to unequal treatment in the criminal justice system.

In cities like New York, Black immigrant communities are heavily policed, which makes them vulnerable to immigration action, said Michelle Parris, an attorney with the Immigrant Defense Project.

“Local policing and practices drive many Black immigrants into the criminal justice system for minor offenses,” Parris said. “That may trigger deportation proceedings and make it harder to fight deportation.”

Such is the case of Abraham Paulos. Born in Sudan to Eritrean parents fleeing war, Paulos came to America in 1981, when he was 9 months old. As a teen he grew up in Chicago, where life was rough. He ended up homeless, jumped a turnstile and stole some library books.

The Sept. 27 Pew Trust article highlighted Paulos’ story. Now 36, he is at risk of being deported to Eritrea — a place he has never visited — for a crime he committed nearly 20 years ago.

The thing is, if he were deported, the Eritrean government does not accept nationals who’ve been deported back into the country, said the article. This would leave Paulos without a country.

“This is how you know we are living in an alternative universe,” Paulos said. “The fact that I don’t have a country works out for me.”

There is an influx of immigrants facing deportation because of past crimes, said Mauricio Norona, a staff attorney from the law center at the African Services Committee, a social services organization for immigrants.

According to the Pew Trust article, in the past, you’d have to have committed a serious crime to be eligible for deportation. But now any contact with the police, even if it’s just an arrest without a conviction, can get immigrants funneled into the deportation pipeline.

Technically, people who entered the country without legal documentation after January 2014 are considered a high priority for criminal deportation, even if they have committed no other offense.

New York’s Brooklyn Flatbush neighborhood is the home of the nation’s largest Black immigrant population, which consists of mostly Caribbean — Haitian and Jamaican — Guyanese and Trinidadian people. And people are seeing and feeling the change around them and are worried, even with New York being a so-called sanctuary city.

“At the local bodegas, parents are afraid to use their government-issued WIC cards to feed their children, for fear of drawing attention to themselves,” the Pew article reported.

“Parents withdraw mounds of cash from the bank, rather than pay for anything electronically. Landlords looking to take advantage of the city’s gentrification craze tell tenants that they’ll report them to immigration officials if they don’t move.”

The Pew report points out while “the face of the immigrant tends to be Latino, specifically, Mexican,” there is as a “rapidly growing group of Black immigrants whose numbers have nearly quadrupled since 1980, to 3.8 million.”

Deportation Crimes Explained

Politicians work toward protection for young illegal immigrants

Politicians work toward protection for young illegal immigrants

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The battle over immigration policy continues as some politicians work toward protecting immigrants who illegally entered the U.S., according to two recent Los Angeles Times articles by Sarah D. Wire and Jazmine Ulloa.

Referring to young immigrants brought here as children, U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan said, “There are people who are in limbo. These are kids who know no other country … and don’t know another home,” reported Wire.

A letter to Ryan signed by 10 House Republicans stated, “These individuals’ status in the United States should not be left to the political winds of different administrations that come to power.”

Central Valley Representatives David Valadao of Hanford and Jeff Denham of Turlock were among the 10 Republicans who signed that letter. They stressed that Congress must find a solution that will protect the hundreds of thousands of people brought to this country illegally as children, reported Wire.

These young immigrants, collectively known as “Dreamers,” are currently protected by DACA regulations initiated by former President Barack Obama.

Valadao and Denham also joined a handful of Republicans in a letter urging President Trump not to end the DACA program, while co-sponsoring legislation aimed at finding a fix.

Meanwhile, former U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. filed a brief on behalf of the California Senate, in support of Chicago’s lawsuit against the Justice Department, according to Ulloa’s article.

Holder said current U.S. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions does not have the constitutional authority to mandate that cities, counties or states participate in federal immigration efforts as a condition to receive their federal public safety awards.

In the brief, Holder said the California Legislature is particularly interested in the Chicago case due to State Senate Bill 54, which looks to limit state and local law enforcement agencies from utilizing resources to question, detain and provide information on immigrants illegally in the country.

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Black immigrants in fear of deportation

Immigrant rights groups express concern about sanctuary city raids

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Immigrant rights groups are concerned that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) is targeting sanctuary cities.

Sanctuary regions are jurisdictions in which local law enforcement agencies focus on public safety instead of on immigration enforcement.

In late September, ICE arrested 498 undocumented immigrants in a nationwide operation that focused on sanctuary cities, or cities and counties that refuse to employ peace officers as immigration agents, according to Orange County Register.

ICE officials said that they were targeting criminal aliens. However, of those detained during the sanctuary city raids, 181 did not have criminal records, reported the Orange County Register.

In Boston, city officials had told the community that immigration raids would not happen. However, ICE rounded up 50 undocumented individuals throughout Massachusetts. Of the individuals detained, 20 had no criminal record, reported WBUR News.

“Our communities are facing a crisis in the U.S. We are tired of that dynamic and rhetoric that is telling us that all immigrants are criminals,” said Patricia Montes, the executive director of Centro Presente, an immigrant advocacy organization located in East Boston.

ICE officials specified that they targeted cities that refuse to cooperate with the president’s immigration policy, reported the Orange County Register.

“They are targeting criminal aliens, and they are focused on high populations of individuals that are here illegally,” said Robin Hvidston, the executive director of We the People Rising, an anti-illegal immigration group in Claremont.

However, immigration advocates across the country say that the raids are doing more harm than good because innocent people are getting caught in the net.

“I know a lot of people that don’t have papers, so it’s kind of sad that they’re afraid of going out of the house,” said Bernice Maldonado, a hairdresser from Boston. “They’re afraid of going to work. They’re afraid of taking the kids to school. They’re afraid of being outside of the house.”

In Los Angeles there were more than 100 arrested. Although ICE officials said that they were targeting immigrants with criminal records, opponents claim there is a political agenda, according to the Orange County Register.

“ICE is operating as a politicized security force … arresting 498 people in cities that represent the political opposition to what is an unconstitutional federal overreach on immigration,” said Salvador Sarmiento, a campaign coordinator for the Los Angeles-based National Day Laborers Organizing Network.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte had introduced the “No Sanctuary for Criminals Act” earlier this year. It would have punished sanctuary jurisdictions for interfering with President Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations and border security, according to The Atlantic. The act would have cut some federal grants from sanctuary cities.

ICE Acting Director Tom Homan said that the agency is forced to use more resources to conduct large arrests in the communities because sanctuary city officials often do not cooperate with them, according to the Orange County Register.

“Instead of criminalizing and scapegoating immigrants, Congress should be offering workable comprehensive reforms that actually strengthen our economy and national security,” said Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, according to The Atlantic. “Until then, we will continue to be a firm wall of resistance—using all tools at our disposal—to prevent Republicans from blindly trying to sanction this administration’s mass deportation agenda.”

 

Deportation Crimes Explained

DACA repeal is a nightmare for Dreamers

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President Donald Trump’s announcement to repeal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is a nightmare for Dreamers, according to withdreamers.com.

President Trump

An estimated 800,000 undocumented immigrants (Dreamers) will be in danger of deportation without the DACA protection. Deferred action is a legal term used to refer to the federal government’s discretion in enforcing deportation against undocumented citizens who register and meet a certain criteria.

On June 15, 2012, the Secretary of Homeland Security announced that people who were brought to the United States as children and met certain guidelines could request that action be deferred for two years at a time, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) website reports.

The president’s decision to rescind DACA is another assault on undocumented communities, opponents to Trump’s decision say.

Now the Trump administration is getting more aggressive in putting people into the deportation system, Vox reports. However, the deportation process is slowing to a crawl because of backlogs.

When an undocumented immigrant is taken into custody by federal immigration agents for the first time, they cannot be deported without their consent, and must go through an immigration hearing to determine whether they are deportable, according to Vox. During the immigration court proceedings, undocumented immigrants can present a case to stay in the country for claims seeking asylum, as refugees, or if they can show that they arrived in the country as a minor prior to 2012.

In a memo to immigration judges in July, the Trump administration encouraged the courts to issue continuances so that undocumented citizens could have more time to prepare their cases and expedite the process, according to Vox.

Trump issued a tweet in which he shifted the DACA and immigration dilemma to Congress. The tweet announced that he would “revisit” DACA if Congress did not pass legislation on the issue in six months.

In the meantime, immigration cases will continue to take years to resolve.

“From November 2016 to June 2017, someone who got an official removal order from an immigration court judge had started the court process 378 days earlier,” according to Vox. “The deportation system simply isn’t built for speedy deportations of people who’ve lived in the U.S. for years.”

The majority of people who the Trump administration has deported are those who were arrested under Obama’s last term of office, according to Vox.

Deportation Crimes Explained

Black immigrants in fear of deportation

Borey Ai is out of prison, but he’s still not a free man

1,475 immigrant children lost

Texas sheriff scales back on immigrant deportation

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Sheriff Sally Hernandez of Travis County, Texas, made good on her campaign promise of scaling back her cooperation with federal immigration officials to screen inmates for deportation, reports the Texas Tribune.

“The public must be confident that local law enforcement is focused on local public safety, not on federal immigration enforcement,” Hernandez said. She said that her jail is not a place to house federal immigration offenders and that her policy will save taxpayer money, reports the Tribune.

However, the announcement sets up a battle between Hernandez and Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who have made a commitment to get rid of “sanctuary cities.” Sanctuary cities is a term used to define law enforcement officials who refuse to enforce immigration laws.

Hernandez said holding a person longer than required by law is a violation of that person’s rights and said her job is to protect public safety, the Tribune reports.

“This office will not increase our liability or set unwise public safety priorities simply to ease the burden of the federal government,” she said.

However, the sheriff’s office reported it will retain people with serious crimes like capital murder, first-degree murder, aggravated sexual assault or human smuggling.

Hernandez said she would comply with the government’s requests if their officers follow the law by obtaining a warrant from a judge ordering the confinement.

Governor Abbott’s response was different. In a tweet Friday evening, he stated, “The Governor’s Office will cut funding [for] Travis County for adopting sanctuary policies. Stiffer penalties [are] coming.”

 

Deportation Crimes Explained

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