Sophorn San, a Cambodian immigrant who'd lived in Rhode Island from age 4, was targeted for deportation after pleading guilty to a gun charge at age 19. Expelled last December amid a spike in Cambodian deportations, San was dead by February. "He did everything right after leaving prison," says his grieving mother, "... and now he is gone."

The people who love Sophorn San were not with him at the North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, prison where he was in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in July 2016. They'll never be able to ask him what he was thinking as he wrote one final, desperate plea for mercy during his final deportation proceedings.

All that is left of those moments are the words he submitted for consideration to an immigration court.

"I am a citizen of Cambodia, although I have not been in that country permanently, since I was four years old," San, then 25, wrote. "After my parents fled Cambodia in 1996, we never returned."

"Although I am a Cambodian citizen on paper, I am in every other way an American," he continued. "I consider the United States to be my home and being deported to Cambodia would cause my family and I great trauma, as I have no connections in Cambodia.

"If I am deported I will be lucky to see my mother, father and brothers once every ten years. ... If I am deported I may never see my family again."

On Dec. 17, 2018, along with 35 others, San was put on a flight to Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital, to start life in a land he never knew.

Although born in Phnom Penh on Sept. 19, 1991, San moved to Rhode Island in 1996 after his family obtained legal residency through sponsorship.

Many of what the U.S. Census Bureau says are 5,749 Cambodians living in the state were motivated to emigrate for the same reasons as the Sans: a genocide led by the Khmer Rouge that left from 1.7 million to 3 million dead, including intellectuals and those from the governing classes, and left the country in a shambles.

"The Vietnam War didn’t just happen in Vietnam," said Steven Dy, an organizer at the Providence Youth Student Movement. "It spilled over into Cambodia and Laos, too. People wanted to continue to live ... so they sought asylum in other countries. They sought freedom and peace."

Those who sought refuge in the U.S. faced many challenges, including resettlement in some of the nation's poorest communities with little social support, Dy said. Many in that environment, like San, became involved in street gangs and found themselves on the wrong side of the law.

In 2010, at age 19, San pleaded guilty to possession of a handgun without a permit and was sentenced to six months in prison with 56 months probation. Only then, his parents said, did they learn of his illicit activities.

"I had no idea what happened," Yoeunmony Say, San's mother, said through an interpreter in Khmer, Cambodia's primary language. "I had no clue about what he was doing when he got arrested. I found out only after that he was hanging out with the wrong crowd."

Cambodian refugees, fleeing the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge, arrived en masse in the U.S. starting in the mid-'70s. Efforts to overcome the challenges of their new environments were hampered further by the language barrier.

Faced with these obstacles, many young people viewed the streets as the only way to support themselves and their families, Dy said.

"When we came to the U.S., it was right after the Vietnam War, and there was still resentment from the war, especially by American people," Dy said. "It kind of isolated us, and some of us broke. Some of us couldn’t handle it and did things that they regret.

"They only did that because they felt like they needed to survive."

San was represented by an attorney from the notoriously overburdened Office of the Public Defender, who advised that he take a plea deal offered by prosecutors. However, neither he nor his attorney took one fact into account.

Under a 1996 immigration-reform bill, Congress had declared that non-citizens such as San who commit aggravated felonies — a category of crime only applicable to immigrants — are subject to deportation.

"Before he took the plea deal, he wasn’t informed of anything. ... He learned about that [deportation] after," said Malica Phath, San's girlfriend. "[His family and friends] said the attorney that represented him did so very poorly and just told him to take it."

In 2015, Providence police arrested San a second time for resisting arrest. He pleaded no contest, and the charge resulted in a probation violation, earning him another six months in prison.

San was granted parole in February 2016. Almost three months later, on May 4, ICE detained San and incarcerated him at the Bristol County House of Corrections in North Dartmouth to begin deportation proceedings on May 24.

The Department of Homeland Security cited San's firearm conviction as their reason for filing the removal order that an immigration judge finalized on Aug. 20.

After being transferred between facilities in several states, San filed a petition of habeas corpus on May 24, 2017, while at the ICE Processing Center in Pine Prairie, Louisiana, arguing that there was no reasonable expectation of his prompt removal after six months of detention, given the Cambodian government's intransigence on repatriations at the time.

ICE released San from custody on June 29, and he was back home in Providence for a dinner of wings and fried rice with friends on July 12. Though he was no longer in ICE custody, the agency's shadow and the pending removal order remained.

San and Malica Phath dated for more than a year before ICE took him into custody a second time on Sept. 12, 2018. Although his detention put pressure on the couple, she said their relationship stayed strong, even after San was deported to Cambodia in December.

"He was so excited," she said, referring to her planned visit to see him in March. "I loved him exactly the same through the whole ordeal. We thought of it all as a momentary pause for us. ... Eventually, we’d be back together."

Then, on Feb. 8 at 2 a.m., she awoke to a phone call from Cambodia.

"The person that [San] was with, Sam, he called me," she said. "He was screaming, 'I’m sorry! I’m sorry!' ... All you could hear was him crying."

Phath, confused by the call, hung up and immediately called another of San's friends, Klue.

"I asked him what was going on," she said, "and he told me, 'I’m looking right at him. He’s gone.'"

At 1 p.m. Phnom Penh time, San was riding a motorcycle when it collided with another bike. The collision threw his body in front of a loaded flatbed truck.

"We spoke with him 10 minutes before it happened," San's father, Chhith San, said. "He said he was going with some friends to get his Cambodian papers."

"Just after it happened, they called me," Say, Sophorn San's mother, said, fighting back tears. "Then they took pictures and put it up on Facebook and sent them to me right away. I passed out when I saw them. I couldn’t believe it."

"I felt nothing but shock," Chhith San said.

"After we found out about it, we went to the temple with the monks to pray with them," Say said. "Then we went to Boston to fly over to Cambodia."

Images that circulated online showed San's body bent over itself, squeezed between two rows of wheels under the vehicle, his head lying in a pool of his own blood.

Sophorn San, 27 years old, born in Phnom Penh, resident of Providence since age 4, was dead.

Driving down Plainfield Pike in Cranston, one might be surprised to see a large Buddha statue suddenly rise from the acres of fields, woods and businesses that surround it.

There, at the Dhamagosnaram Buddhist Temple one rainy Sunday in March, Cambodians gathered to hear Say and San recall the months following their son's detention and the last moment they saw him alive, during a visit to a New Hampshire detention facility where he had been transferred.

"All I did was pray for him," Say said. "We couldn't say much because [having been raised in the U.S. since 4] he did not speak Khmer well. I couldn’t hug him because there was a divider glass. We just put our hands up against the glass.

"We just cried and prayed, and I told him I missed him."

They next saw him on Feb. 14, lying in repose in the basement of a Russian hospital in Phnom Penh.

"They brought us to a room with the casket," Phath said. "They lit some incense and we said a prayer."

"We saw the casket," Say said, tearfully. "Then they opened it so we could see the body."

"I just cried and hugged him," she said, breaking into sobs. "The people there had to take me off him; I didn’t want to let him go. He was my son."

San's removal from the U.S. was part of a 279-percent increase in deportations of Cambodians between fiscal years 2017 and 2018, according to ICE, after the Cambodian government bowed to pressure from the U.S. following a dispute between the two governments over the amount of money paid to Cambodia per deportee.

"On September 13, 2017, DHS announced the implementation of visa sanctions on Cambodia due to a lack of historical cooperation with regard to accepting their nationals who have been ordered removed," ICE spokesman Brendan Raedy said in response to a request by The Journal. Similar sanctions were applied to Eritrea, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Raedy added that ICE was making "progress" with removals, and that as of March nationwide, there were 1,784 deportation orders for Cambodian nationals, 1,294 of whom had convictions on their records. Figures were not available from ICE on the number of Cambodian deportees who had been living in Rhode Island.

Even deportations in other states have a ripple effect on the Cambodian community here.

"My brother-in-law detained in Texas is going through a similar case," said Kaen Ethseth, of East Providence, in an interview in early March. She said her brother-in-law cares for her husband's elderly parents. "I am very worried about what will happen to them if he's deported."

About a week after that interview, officials from the Cambodian Embassy visited the Texas detention center to interview and provide documentation for their detainee nationals in preparation for a May flight to Cambodia. Ethseth's brother-in-law was one of the last three people scheduled for interviews that day, but the officials left before they had time to speak with him. His deportation is now delayed for several months.

"I am speechless at this whole situation. It's out of our hands, and we can't do anything about it," said Sophal Chun, a citizen born to Cambodian immigrants in Providence. "It is a situation that is affecting every family throughout the city.

"You are breaking families apart," he added. "You are causing a lot of heartache."

After his June 2017 release, San began life anew. He got a job assembling computers at a local technology company where his mother works. He even moved in with Phath and her two children, son Jayvien Ngoeun, 11, and daughter Lalida Ngoeun, 9, in August 2018. They hoped to move to Louisiana with San's family the following year to be closer to his brother.

The only part of his life that was different from those around him was an annual July check-in at ICE's offices in Warwick. Phath accompanied San to that check-in, and he told her he had to return in September to sign some paperwork.

Say ordinarily packed her son a lunch for work each day. But on Sept. 12 — the day he'd been instructed to return to the ICE office — he told her not to.

"He must have known about the deportation order," she said, dabbing a tissue to her eyes. "But he probably kept it to himself so that he wouldn’t worry us so much."

"That day, a friend of his came and said that he was arrested and being sent to Cambodia," San's father said. "That's how we found out."

"He went in there and never came out," Phath said. "I must've been waiting a half-hour when a guy came out and showed me that he had signed a paper and was in their custody.

"I was speechless," she said haltingly, overwhelmed by emotion. "I just dropped down to my knees and cried."

Phath's children — who she said saw San as a father figure — had been shielded from the severity of the situation.

"After a bit, they started asking for him, and during a phone call he told me to let them talk to him [from detention]," she said. "He told them not to worry about him being there. That he was on a work trip, building spaceships and robots.

"After a while they started to catch on," she continued. "They saw they were not getting their pictures and not hearing from him that often."

Along with the emotional challenges San's loved ones faced, his incarceration, detention and deportation added to their financial difficulties.

"My son help me and my wife with the bill and food," Chhith San wrote in testimony to stop his son's deportation in 2016. "I have accident at work and cannot work. ... My son help take care of me and my wife."

"Since he finish school [he] has been working and helping me financially because my husband is sick," Say wrote in her testimony. "Sophorn is the responsible man at our house, having my son detained has caused a big impact in our life.

"I am lost without him in my life."

Traumatized by civil war and genocide under the Khmer Rouge, and then placed into new environments in the U.S. without proper support structures, many Cambodian immigrants began to struggle economically in their new home.

"You can tell the historical trauma affects us just by the kind of financial status that most families come from and are in," Dy said. "You think there’d be some progress, but there’s so much trauma being held from our parents and grandparents that it’s hard to come to terms that your family was never meant to have a lot."

"Our parents are still in survival mode," he added. "They can’t afford to sit down and talk to you about their day. They need to make money."

A 2014 study by the Center for Southeast Asians found that in Rhode Island, the average annual per-capita income is $28,707 and the median household income is $54,902; Cambodians in the state have a per capita income of $11,474 and median household income of $42,397.

The study found that 25.1 percent of Cambodians in Rhode Island live below the poverty level, compared with 12.2 of all Rhode Islanders.

Such circumstances make any extra income critical, and it is often the families' adult children who must bring that in, Dy said.

"After 20, 30 years in the U.S., families have grown accustomed to a certain way of living," Dy said. "If a person who has an order of removal is the breadwinner, it affects the community a lot. It disempowers them."

Both of San's parents cited his role as a family breadwinner in seeking to convince the courts to revoke his removal order. Since his father could not work, income to support the three plus a younger son came only from the hands of San and his mother. Without him, Say is earning just $27,040 annually.

The legal battle added to the family's expenses: court fees, attorney fees, support for San in Cambodia after his deportation, and, ultimately, his funeral costs.

"The whole situation stressed me out, because I had to deal with the bills in the house and make sure he had what he needed over there," Phath, a nail technician who earns $18,000 annually, said. "It overwhelmed me, but I kept it together for him."

San's parents — both survivors of the Killing Fields — said that the trauma tore open new emotional and psychological wounds.

"At work, our desks were across from each other," Say said. "When I look across, I see his desk is empty and it makes me feel empty, too."

"I think about him every day," Chhith said. "I cannot get him out of my mind.

"This whole thing has even caused me to lose memories of him."

Phath said that though her daughter has adjusted, her son is showing signs of depression, and her health has also taken a hit.

"Ever since he found out that he was gone, he has just been very quiet," she said of her son. "He’ll come home from school. Sometimes he will eat, sometimes he won’t eat. Then he just goes to his room and shuts the door."

"I am not eating like I’m supposed to," she continued. "I am not sleeping like I am supposed to. I feel like I am here, but sometimes my mind is not.

"I usually just work. It is the only thing that keeps my mind off things."

One of the largest obstacles facing deportees in their new home is the language barrier, a challenge for their communities in the U.S. as well.

"The first generation of folks coming here only knew [Khmer]," said Dy. "When your child can’t connect with you, it says a lot about how your family functions."

San, whose primary language was English, had enough knowledge of Khmer to speak on a basic level with his parents. Yet it was not sufficient to function in Cambodia.

He got settled with the help of a local group dedicated to serving deportees as they transition into their new lives by helping them find work, providing temporary housing and teaching the basics of navigating the country.

San's loved ones said that while in Cambodia, he went out with his friends, sang karaoke, played pool, and earned some money by cutting other deportees' hair. Yet integration into the culture was a challenge.

"He said it was a struggle, because he doesn’t really speak the language too much," Phath said. "They look at deportees as bad people [over there]. They don’t talk to them or associate with them."

Yet, when they spoke of his time in Cambodia, the family smiled because he appeared happy those two months.

"He said he was willing to work and waiting for us to go visit him," Say said. "But he was happy because he wasn’t in prison anymore. He had freedom."

"He was just glad that he was out of the plane and out of the handcuffs," Phath said. "That he was not in a holding cell."

The spike in deportations struck fear in Cambodian-American communities almost immediately, though some were not aware what was going on until recently.

"I did not realize that this was happening in our community," said Danny Khiev, a Cranston resident who came from Cambodia as a refugee in 1988. "Hearing [the Sans'] story broke my heart.

"I voted for Trump, but if he does not change this policy I will have to change my vote," he said. "Next time I vote, I'll have to think about it, because my people are dying."

"We know that there have been round-ups since the beginning of March," Dy said, noting that he knew of at least one local person seized around March 2. "[For now], we try to help the diaspora out there prepare for the next flight out there.

"We are expecting many more [flights]."

San's family asked only one question: Why was their Sophorn punished twice?

"He did what he did," Say said, referring to his prison time. "Why did they have to give him a death sentence, too?. ... Sending him off to Cambodia was like sending him off to die.

"I want the government to make sure they think hard before they send people off like that again to get killed."

"He did everything right after leaving prison," San said. "He went to work, got his life together and now he is gone. Nothing is clear to me here."

Phath said that although the Obama administration deported many as well, the current government is what brought the present situation to crisis levels.

"I feel I would be so speechless just looking at [Trump] if he were here," she said. "I'd ask him, 'How could he be so harsh and cruel to families?'

"You have people born in the States that are shooting up schools and they’re getting lesser punishments," she continued. "You commit a small crime, and because you’re an immigrant you get punished harshly for it, and look at the results.

"I believe in second chances. Everybody makes mistakes. If they learned from it, they should have that chance."

Feb. 17 was a sunny day in Phnom Penh. San's remains, newly cremated at a nearby temple, were now held within a yellow plastic bag in the hands of a somber Say.

In moments, she would spread her son's ashes into the Mekong River. The stillness of the scene stood in stark contrast to the moments before his cremation the previous day.

"People had to keep me away from the body before the cremation because they were worried I would try and hold on to him," San said.

"I put my hand on his casket and told him I love him and that I’d see him soon," Phath said. "I didn’t want to let him go and wished none of this ever happened to us because he was such a good person."

Phath said that the moment Say put San's ashes in the river, there was closure, even if the adjustment to life without him continues to be difficult.

"If I sleep and I dream of him, I usually think about his smile," she said. "He had the biggest smile. His smile was contagious."

Say though, will forever remember the last moment she held her son before allowing the Mekong's currents to take him on his final journey.

"We prayed when we spread his ashes there," she said. "We prayed with gladness that he was safe now and prayed for him to have a good life in the next life.

"We prayed that something like this would not happen again to a Cambodian. ... Or anyone else."

CAMBODIA'S TORTURED HISTORY



• The Vietnam War expanded beyond that country's borders into Laos and Cambodia, resulting in civil war and military action against them by both North Vietnam and the U.S. On April 9, 1975, Marxist rebels known as the Khmer Rouge (Red Khmers) took over Phnom Penh, the nation's capital, routing the previous authoritarian Khmer Republic under Gen. Lon Nol.

• The group's leader, Pol Pot, then embarked on a genocide that claimed the lives of between 1.7 million and 3 million over four years. The regime's primary goal was to take the nation back to Year 0 in the pursuit of a new agrarian society, and its previous governing and intellectual classes were wiped out in what has come to be known as the Killing Fields.

• In 1979, Vietnamese armed forces occupied the country and established a puppet regime, the People's Republic of Kampuchea, a one-party state tasked with rebuilding a nation with totally gutted infrastructure.

• Many Cambodians were born refugees during the 1970s, '80s, '90s, in Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia. The U.S. took in many during this period and passed the Refugee Act in 1980, creating a system for their acceptance and settlement in the U.S.

• Since then, several waves of deportations have taken place among the community, including many under the Obama administration. Nonetheless, the increase between fiscal 2017 and 2018 marks the greatest jump and highest number of removals of Cambodians since 2002.

Source: Sorany Var of Khmerlife.com; Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse Immigration.



— kandrade@providencejournal.com

(401) 277-7646

On Twitter: @Kevprojo