Read: Cambodia’s dark tourism

Growing up, Sek struggled to connect with his parents—a common phenomenon among children of Khmer Rouge survivors—and instead found “family” in gangs: the Crips and then the Asian Boyz. At 19, Sek and his friends unleashed a barrage of bullets on a Philadelphia bar whose patrons, he said, had previously bombarded them with beer bottles and racist slurs. He was arrested in 1997, found guilty of attempted murder the following year, and imprisoned until he got parole in May. Less than a month after getting out, though, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him; by December, he was in Cambodia.

Each of the dozen or so deportees I spoke with told me a similar story: They grew up poor, joined gangs out of self-defense, and didn’t know they were once eligible to pursue American citizenship, prior to their criminal convictions. Those born in Cambodia remember only the Khmer Rouge; those born in Thai refugee camps consider Cambodia little more than an ancestral homeland. All these deportees are visibly American. Locals, citing their tattoos, attire, speech, and swagger, believe them to be monied barang—“foreigners”—or overseas Khmer tourists, rather than true Cambodians.

I met Sek on his third day in Cambodia, at a transitional home on Phnom Penh’s outskirts run by a nongovernmental organization known as the Khmer Vulnerability Aid Organization (KVAO). He and many other new arrivals grew up in African American communities and essentially took on that culture, including music tastes, dress, and speech—many, for example, continued wearing baggy NBA or NFL jerseys in Cambodia, while others referred to their friends as “homeys.”

“In North Philly, I was dealing with mostly blacks and Puerto Ricans,” Sek told me. “That's probably why I talk the way I talk.”

KVAO offers deportees temporary housing, medical and psychological support, and employment assistance, and it secures their Cambodian identity documents. It also does something perhaps more important: taking deportees around their unfamiliar homeland, particularly into various sweltering markets, for a cultural crash course on how to dress, act, bargain.

“Many of the deportees left Cambodia as young children and never went back, so they are lost when they are turned loose in Phnom Penh,” Phil Robertson, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, told me. “KVAO is really the network that enables them to adapt and survive.”

And for many deportees, the transition from the United States to steeply hierarchical Cambodia, where they’re expected to show homage to monks, the elderly, and politicians, is difficult. In the early 2000s, one balked when a waitress at a bar served him after another patron, despite having arrived first. The customer who had been served earlier turned out to be an oligarch with close ties to senior Cambodian government officials, and he had his acolytes savagely beat the deportee, according to Bill Herod, KVAO’s founder. This past December, another deportee revved his malfunctioning motorcycle outside the home of a military general, whose bodyguards cracked the deportee’s skull, Herod said.