to get Cambodia to start accepting deportees, US gov stopped issuing visas to Cambodia diplomats
“For the longest time these individuals have been living in the country basically as Americans,” says Mariategue. “They just didn't know that there would be deportation consequences to their actions.”
In 2002, Cambodia and the US signed an agreement that allowed the country to receive deportees. But the Cambodian government continued to accept anywhere between 30 to fewer than 100 people. In 2017, the US stopped issuing visas for high-ranking Cambodian diplomats to protest that they were not issuing travel documents to people whom the US wanted to deport.
According to the Department of Homeland Security in September 2017, “There are more than 1,900 Cambodian nationals residing in the United States who are subject to a final order of removal, of whom 1,412 have criminal convictions.”
Advocates say that pressuring the Cambodian government to accept more detainees is a departure from previous administrations. The Cambodian government wants to change its 2002 memorandum of understanding with the US to look more like agreements with other countries. The Vietnamese government, for example, has an agreement that prevents repatriation of anyone who arrived in the US before 1995, which is meant to protect refugees.
https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-05-10/after-deportation-family-wisconsin-will-start-anew-cambodia
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Sothy Kum was detained by Immigration and Custom Enforcement in December 2016. He was released in time to celebrate his daughter’s first birthday, with his wife Lisa Kum, in August 2017 at Devil’s Lake State Park in Baraboo, Wisconsin. Sothy, who came to the US from Cambodia at age 2, was detained again that October and deported in April 2018. Credit: Courtesy of Lisa Kum
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