Dishonoring America's Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines [View all]

[TygrBright]

Trump Moves to Deport Vietnam War Refugees

From The Atlantic:

“The United States and Vietnam signed a bilateral agreement on removals in 2008 that establishes procedures for deporting Vietnamese citizens who arrived in the United States after July 12, 1995, and are subject to final orders of removal,” the spokesperson said. “While the procedures associated with this specific agreement do not apply to Vietnamese citizens who arrived in the United States before July 12, 1995, it does not explicitly preclude the removal of pre-1995 cases.”

...

When it first decided to reinterpret the 2008 deal, Donald Trump’s administration argued that only pre-1995 arrivals with criminal convictions were exempt from the agreement’s protection and eligible for deportation. Vietnam initially conceded and accepted some of those immigrants before stiffening its resistance; about a dozen Vietnamese immigrants ended up being deported from the United States. The August decision to change course, reported to a California court in October, appeared to put such moves at least temporarily on ice, but the latest shift leaves the fate of a larger number of Vietnamese immigrants in doubt. Now all pre-1995 arrivals are exempt from the 2008 agreement’s protection.

Many pre-1995 arrivals, all of whom were previously protected under the 2008 agreement by both the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, were refugees from the Vietnam War. Some are the children of those who once allied with American and South Vietnamese forces, an attribute that renders them undesirable to the current regime in Hanoi, which imputes anti-regime beliefs to the children of those who opposed North Vietnam. This anti-Communist constituency includes minorities such as the children of the American-allied Montagnards, who are persecuted in Vietnam for both their ethnicity and Christian religion.

This is a gut punch for me. I was a young adult in the late 1970s when waves of Hmong, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao people began arriving in the wake of the Vietnam War. I lived in St. Paul, Minnesota, which received one of the largest influxes of Hmong refugees as well as many Vietnamese. It was pretty chaotic for a few years. I was working in the social service system at the time and I remember complaining about the difficulties of receiving and acculturating and assisting so many people who were so far removed from modern urban American culture.

Until a colleague who was a retired Marine, a Vietnam veteran, took me aside. Here's a paraphrase of what he told me:

"Don't you EVER complain about the cost to us of sheltering and assisting these people. These are the people who believed the bullshit the CIA told them about fighting communism, and threw in their lot with us. These are the people whose sons and fathers and husbands enlisted to fight beside us, guide us through the jungle, get our wounded under cover, shelter our downed pilots, cover our backtrails and help us survive.

And they paid for it, not only with their own dead, but with their homes and their land and their futures. We promised them, we Marines, we soldiers, PROMISED them that we would treat them as comrades. That we'd shelter them. That we'd restore some kind of future for their families and their children.

Now we're redeeming that promise.

If we EVER want to be trusted again when the lives of our troops are on the line, we need to keep that promise, make good on our word, and be the kind of comrades we should be to everyone who sacrifices for us.

I never want to hear you complain about that again. Your Dad was a Marine, don't make him ashamed of you."

That stuck with me.

I do not want to see [Redacted] dishonoring that promise. I hope every retired and active military member understands the stakes, and speaks out against this dishonor.

angrily,
Bright