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A Vietnamese exchange student who married a U.S. citizen nonetheless is facing deportation because, as her husband says, she “tripped up” on the immigration process and is now in jail, reports KSTP-TV5 here.

Hoa Nguyen came to the U.S. on a student visa ten years ago, attending Luther College in Iowa where she met her future husband, Dan Hanson.

After graduating in 2003, the two of them moved to Minneapolis-St. Paul, where Hoa completed her Master’s in French Literature at the University of Minnesota.

In November 2008, they got married. Then they traveled to Vietnam and had their wedding there too.

All was well and good until they tried to enter the U.S. again and somebody noted that Hoa had not been going to school and so had overstayed her student visa, reports the Star-Tribune here. This is known as being “out of status” as tons and tons of other Vietnamese exchange students understand.

But she was allowed to re-enter the U.S. anyway, and she was given a court date to appear.

Then she missed that court date. So now she’s in jail waiting to be deported.

Her husband, friends and roommates have set up a web site called FreeHoa.org, where Hanson passionately pleads for his wife’s release.

Hanson says Hoa was confused about the court date and he, Hanson, wasn’t able to help her out because he didn’t know about any court date in the first place.

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Lost in legal limbo, Vietnamese children of American servicemen are lobbying Congress for passage of the Amerasian Paternity Act, which would give them the same rights granted to all other children of all Americans: U.S. Citizenship.

The story of their lobbying is told in touching details by the L.A. Times‘ My-Thuan Tran in a Column One story here. 

The children of U.S. military who fought in Vietnam, casually called Amerasians, are given the right to enter the U.S. That right, however, has given rise to instances of fraud and, in some cases, schemes that come perilously close to human trafficking.

Even that, though, is still just half the story. The other half is, once they’re in the country, they’re stuck. They have no right for citizenship, no matter how long they’re here. All legal immigrants, their passport status becomes no better than that of undocumented aliens.

My-Thuan’s story centers around Randy Tran, a singer, best known for the song “After the War” (in Vietnamese: Sau Cuoc Chien) about the one consequence of the war that not a lot of people pay attention to: The Amerasians and their heritage.

My-Thuan’s story also marks the first time the Bolsavik learns of Randy’s last name — another sign of how the stories of Amerasians tend to be ignored by people who consider themselves of “pure” Viet blood. Perhaps not ignored with malice, but ignored nonetheless.

Below the jump is a YouTube video of Randy singing “After the War.”

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The OC Register’s Deepa Bharath has a nice and sweet story here about Madalenna Lai and her Freedom Boat being at Westminster yesterday and today. Photo above is by the Register’s Bruce Chambers.

Madalenna Lai runs the Vietnam Culture House in Pomona. In 2002, the Vietnam Culture House successfully won a place in the Rose Parade for the first (and so far only) float representing the Vietnamese-American community. Read here.

The “Freedom Boat” is an actual boat used by Vietnamese refugees to flee communist Vietnam. This particular boat carried 15 people who landed in the Phillipines.

If you talk to other boat people, you will hear that having 15 people on a boat that size is something of a luxury. A boat of that size would typically cram more than 70.

The Freedom Boat has been to Little Saigon before. The last time it was here was in March 2007, for the World Premiere of the movie “Journey from the Fall.” Pictured below is the boat at that time, in front of the Rose Center; photo taken by Benjamin Vu.

Hoa Van Tran, the sole Democratic candidate for OC Supervisor, District 1, on Thursday night stated his personal view on illegal immigration to OC Weekly’s Gustavo Arellano here: He thinks they should be given some type of amnesty.

The Bolsavik came over and asked Hoa (picture) what he meant. And he said, “That’s exactly what I meant. That’s my personal stand.”

“Illegal immigrants should be given some way to become legal immigrants and to naturalize,” he said.

So the Bolsavik and Hoa sat down to get some more details. Hoa opened with the statement that “It’s really a federal matter. I’m just stating my personal feeling.”

But what about the perception that Vietnamese voters are conservative law-and-order types who’d want to deport all illegals?

“I don’t think that’s right,” Hoa said. “When we left Vietnam as boat people, we went to a third country. Like Malaysia or Hong Kong. When we came, they put us in camps, because we were illegal.”

“We’re legal now,” Hoa said, “but we were illegal when we landed in the refugee camps.”

Hoa himself was a boat person who landed in Singapore. He mentioned the Whitehead camp in Hong Kong several times. That camp was notorious as the very last refugee camp in Hong Kong, and from which tens of thousands of Vietnamese were forced back to the communist country by the British in their hurry to turn the island over to the Chinese government.

Hoa explained further, “From a practical standpoint, how would you deport 10 to 12 million people?” He pointed out that all three major presidential candidates - McCain, Obama, Clinton - have repudiated mass deportation.

“As Democrats, we look at social issues. We need to help out the little guys who have no voice,” Hoa said. “This country was built on immigrants, and we shouldn’t turn our back on immigrants.”

But there’s a difference between legal immigrants and illegal immigrants, no?

“Look,” Hoa said. “There are illegal immigrants from everywhere. There are illegal immigrants from Mexico, there are Asian illegal immigrants from Vietnam. There are white illegal immigrants from Europe and Canda. Do we check everybody, check their passports, check their birth certificates? Or do we only check based on skin color?”

“From a human standpoint, I am an immigrant,” Hoa said. “When we landed in Singapore, we were illegal. When other Vietnamese landed in Thailand, Hong Kong, Malaysia, we were all illegal.”

What about Assemblyman Van Thai Tran (no relations) and OC Supervisor Janet Nguyen and their stands on immigration?

Phu Do Nguyen, one of Hoa’s most ardent supporters and one-time campaign treasurer, who had been listening from a safe distance away, walked over and chimed in, “The guy (Van Tran) is a disgrace. He doesn’t know where he’s coming from.” Hoa calmed Phu down: “Van came in 1975, he wasn’t a boat person.”

Phu kept on, “Just because we achieved our American dream doesn’t mean we should turn our back on other people who want to pursue their American dream.”

But, we Vietnamese were escaping an oppressive communist regime. Whereas, let’s take Mexico; Mexico is a democratic country.

Not really, Phu said. “In the refugee camps, everybody’s positioning themselves so they could be resettled in America. Nobody wanted to go to Australia or France. Why? If seeking freedom was the only reason, we’d go anywhere, not just America. No, we were also chasing the American dream.”

So what would Hoa do about it? Nothing. “I’m just stating my personal stand. It’s really a federal matter. I’m running for county office.”

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).