Listen to your lawyer, get deported
March 12th, 2008
This may very well be the biggest issue facing the Viet community. A real issue that is, affecting real people, real families, not a phony symbolic issue made for showboating and electioneering. The issue is the Bush administration’s deporting people to Vietnam.
Several meetings had already been held in Little Saigon on this issue, and another one is coming up this Saturday at Little Saigon Radio from 2pm to 4pm. The person putting this together is Derrick H. Nguyen aka Nguyen Hoang Dung, a former commissioner on the White House Initiative on Asian-Pacific Americans. Read the announcment here (in Vietnamese).
A number of Congress members have also raised their voices about this. Loretta Sanchez, Zoe Lofgren, and a whole bunch of others wrote a letter to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff objecting to the deportation of people to a communist dictatorship.
Joining the 10 Democrats are the 3 Cuban-American congress members from Florida: Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Mario Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Read the letter here.
How did this come about?
Right before Tet, the Bush administration sprang a surprise on the Vietnamese community. The head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on January 22 signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on deportation with Vietnam.
Not all Viets, only those who arrived in the US on or after July 12, 1995, and who have not had U.S. citizenship. Read the DHS press release here.
Now, how is that a surprise you ask? I mean, you do the crime you do the time right?
Turns out, most of the 1500 Viets that may be subject to this MOU are simply people who were persuaded by their lawyers to plead to whatever they were accused of, in exchange for lesser punishment. They already did their time, never knowing that years later a new punishment awaits them.
That fact became clear at the various community events in reaction to this latest blow to this immigrant community.
At a very well attended town hall meeting in February organized by Legal Aid with Nguyen Nam Loc - a well-known and respected immigration activist with Catholic Charities - many people there related that they had pled to various charges (mostly drug possession) not knowing the immigration consequences.
For that matter, for years and years people ordered deported never were, because Vietnam didn’t accept them. So a lot of people got complacent and didn’t think it was an issue.
Oh well, now they know. Shouldn’t have listened to their lawyers.
Talk about lawyers.
The person who signed the MOU on behalf of the United States is Julie L. Myers, a 38-year-old lawyer (photo). Myers holds her position of Assistant Secretary of DHS for ICE by recess appointment.
Her appointment was controversial from the start, with even some hotshot Republicans such as Ohio Senator Voinovich initially saying that she’s unqualified for the job, according to the Washington Post here.
A former federal prosecutor, Myers was appointed to head the huge immigration enforcement agency without any experience in immigration law or any experience heading a large agency.
On the other hand, she’s the niece of former JCS Chairman Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, a former chief of staff for Chertoff when he was at Justice, and she married his current chief of staff at the time of her appointment to ICE (he’s now U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri).
Tags: deportation, Nguyen Hoang Dung
