Mout Iv is an American, and if you have your doubts, just glance around his storefront in Olney for a second. Touch Up Barbershop, down a flight of stairs on Front and Champlost streets, is where Iv has been snipping hair for the past five years, and it has the all the accoutrements of someone who loves their country (and city) perhaps a little too much. Everything from the chairs to the door is painted red, white and blue, and along with flags, he possesses several odes to American sports: a Phillies towel, World Series 2008 paraphernalia, a photograph of Michael Jordan, a 76ers poster.
Iv is American in most other ways, as well: He's lived in Philly since he was a young boy, and the only language he speaks fluently is English. He listens to rap. When I met him this August, he was wearing a red sideways cap, a sweatband and sneakers, and talked a lot about God — as in the Christian one.
But by law, he's not quite. Now a chubby-cheeked 33-year-old, Iv was born in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime, the Communist experiment that killed off a fifth of its people by starvation, disease and execution. For most Americans, Pol Pot is a metaphor for a nightmarish leader, but for Iv and his brethren, he's the man responsible for impaling their relatives with bayonets and skinning their countrymen alive. Iv got out of Cambodia as a 2-year-old, living in Thai refugee camps until he turned 9, when the United States admitted him and his mother into the country as refugees. (Iv has never met his father.)
Throughout the early 1980s, 145,000 fellow Cambodians joined him in the U.S. Like other Cambodian refugees, Iv became a permanent resident of the U.S., though not a full-fledged citizen, because he "didn't know the difference and no one told them otherwise," says Mia-lia Kiernan, a volunteer for One Love Movement, a local group of Cambodian activists.
For a while, there was no difference.
That changed on May 6, 1998. Iv was 21, and lodged himself in the middle of what he calls a "street fight that went wrong." After Iv and his friends traded insults with a man on their block, they punched and stabbed him — though Iv didn't do the stabbing — and ended up sending the man to the hospital. Iv was found guilty of aggravated assault, simple assault, criminal conspiracy and recklessly endangering another person, and served six years in prison.
He doesn't regret getting caught, but he does believe his crime should be viewed in a larger context; many Cambodian refugees grew up in poor, urban areas rife with crime and racial tension. "They put us right here in the hut, the 'hood," he says. "But if I hadn't been locked up, I would be in a worse situation. I haven't been in trouble since."
Indeed, by most accounts, he's wrestled down the elusive American dream: He earned his GED and a degree in fiber optics, opened his own business, and has a fiancee and two young children.
"For kids, he's a great example of someone who's been able to reform," says Kiernan.
He probably won't be for long: Iv is currently shackled in the York County Detention Center, awaiting deportation to Cambodia, a country he hasn't seen since he was a toddler. That's because in 1996, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty acts, which made deportation mandatory for any immigrant who commits an "aggravated felony," an opaque term that includes everything from non-violent drug offenses to tax evasion. (Prior to '96, refugees and other legal immigrants were deportable only if they committed a crime with a sentence of five years or more.) The laws also rendered non-citizen immigrants ineligible for both forgiveness and individual consideration before the court, effectively disintegrating their right to due process.
These laws went into effect two years before Iv committed his crime, but even then, Cambodians interviewed for the piece say few knew a guilty conviction could one day lead to deportation. After all, the immigration reform bill was a relatively small part of the 750-page 1996 omnibus appropriations bill; if you didn't pay attention to Congressional actions or read the papers regularly— and it's safe to say many immigrants didn't — it likely escaped your attention. Besides, the U.S. hadn't returned a single Cambodian refugee since the Vietnam War, leading many to assume that refugees were forever exempt from removal. It wasn't until 2002 — four years after Iv's conviction — that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began returning Cambodian refugees again.
Regardless, Iv is now where hundreds of Cambodian-Americans have been before him, and if community members and immigrant advocates are right, where many more will be in the coming months.
"I came here when I was 9. I wouldn't be able to survive in Cambodia," Iv told me in Old City a few weeks before he was detained. "I just want to watch my kids grow, raise them right."
When President Barack Obama took office, Cambodians thought things would be different. His campaign rhetoric boasted of "comprehensive immigration reform," and he vowed to "reunite families" and allow "undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English ... [and] become citizens." Most of all, Obama gave Cambodians the impression that he would address immigration humanely — and they felt that, as refugees, this applied to them directly.
By their count, the opposite happened. Since 2002, when Cambodia began accepting U.S. deportees again, 288 Cambodian-Americans have been deported. (Though that may seem infinitesimal compared to, say, the 1.6 million Mexicans who've been deported during the same time, the total number of Cambodians in the U.S. is 247,000, whereas there are about 31 million Mexicans here.) ICE says that it has deported 30 Cambodian-Americans thus far in 2010, which puts it on pace to eclipse at least six of the last nine years.
But by the end of 2010, that number may be exponentially higher: ICE's data only captures deportees whose arrival in their native country has been confirmed, a process that sometimes takes months. Additionally, officials from the Cambodian consulate recently interviewed more than 200 Cambodian-Americans from around the nation in the York County Detention Center to gauge if they were eligible for deportation, activists say; previously, the highest number interviewed at a single time was 75, in 2006.
In Philadelphia, where many Cambodians feel they've gotten off somewhat easy throughout the past decade in contrast to "Khmerican" hubs like Long Beach, Calif., immigration enforcement has especially increased. Most years, maybe one or two Cambodians were deported from the city — last year, none were — but seven have already been booted in 2010, and that doesn't count Iv and at least four other local men awaiting deportation in York County.
According to ICE, it's nothing personal: Under Obama's presidency, deportation of all populations is up in a major way. The department expects to deport 400,000 immigrants this fiscal year — that's 10 percent more than the Bush administration deported in 2008, and 25 percent more than it did in 2007.
Out of those, nearly half will be "criminal aliens," as ICE refers to legal and illegal immigrants who have been convicted of crimes — also a record number.
"There used to be a small trickle of deportations each year. I haven't seen Cambodians getting rounded up in these substantial numbers until now," says Steve Morley, Iv's lawyer. "My guess is the current administration thinks it can sell immigration reform if it shows it can be aggressive in other areas, like deporting criminals."
Indeed, ridding the nation of criminals sounds like a lofty idea. But perhaps it's not that simple. The vast majority of Cambodian refugees being deported are convicted criminals, and many transgressed as youth. Kiernan argues that because these refugees lived through the harrowing Khmer Rouge regime, "You had parents with very serious [post-traumatic stress disorder] who couldn't be the parents they needed to be for their children, which is why a lot of the kids got involved in gang activity. Not to mention, they were settled into these neighborhoods that were already very troubled."
Says David Seng, a Cambodian activist and refugee who came here as a child, "America set up no support system for us. You started school in the U.S., you got beat up and chased around and looked at differently. So you grouped up to protect yourself. That led to gangs." He adds that because the Khmer Rouge killed off so many men and intellectuals, countless Cambodian refugees grew up with single, poor mothers who barely spoke English.
Add up these compounding handicaps, and Cambodian-Americans have become "the greatest failure of the refugee program in this country," Lavinia Limon, executive director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, told The New York Times in 2003. Compared to other refugee populations, they routinely come in last in social indicators like income level, literacy and employment. Many immigrant activists fault the U.S. for first admitting these refugees to broadcast the horrors of Communism, and then abandoning them after a brief, halfhearted introduction to a foreign land.
Conservative groups, of course, see it differently. "We're tired of America being blamed for everything," says William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration. "The most important factor are the victims of these crimes: American citizens. Legal immigrants are our guests in America, and they need to abide by the law, or get removed."
But for local Cambodian-Americans, the fact that after all they've suffered, more of their mothers, sons and neighbors are now being deported — especially under an administration they believed in — "feels like death," says Ria Cruz of Olney, whose husband, Chally Dang, is awaiting deportation in York.
For years, the Cambodian community held out for a law that would exempt refugees from deportation — especially those who came here as children, committed a crime and then rehabilitated — to no avail. Now they're just hoping for due process.
But even that seems like a long shot. Under the 1996 laws, criminal refugees are not eligible for an individualized hearing before an immigration court, even with a recent Supreme Court ruling in their favor. This March, the court declared in Padilla v. Kentucky that lawyers must warn their clients that a guilty plea could lead to deportation. Immigration attorneys argue that prior to '96, lawyers of Cambodian refugees couldn't have possibly done this; in fact, until Cambodia began admitting deportees again in 2002, many lawyers were still giving inadequate advice.
The ruling has done little for immigrants, however. Take Hov Ly Kol, a 35-year-old Cambodian who's called South Philly home with his single mother since he was 10. In August, he was deported for robbery charges to which he pleaded guilty in 1995. Since he was released in 2007, he's "totally rehabilitated ... . He [got] involved with volunteering with kids, tried to tell them not to make his mistakes," says Seng. Kol's lawyer fought for a stay of removal on the basis of Padilla v. Kentucky, among other rulings, but could barely get in touch with her client. According to Kol's family, he was transferred to six different detention centers — from York, Pa., to Tacoma, Wash. — in the few weeks leading up to his Aug. 31 deportation.
U.S. Rep. Bob Brady even lobbied for Kol, writing in a letter to ICE: "Due to ... Padilla v. Kentucky, it is possible that Mr. Kol is eligible to file to reopen the criminal matter that serves as the basis for his order of deportation ... [I] strongly encourage that steps be taken so as to preserve Mr. Kol's right to due process of law. This would include staying his deportation for a reasonable period of time."
Even then, it wasn't.
"There needs to be a review mechanism," says Morley, "where people like [Iv] can show that they've learned their lesson and have been good men not just for a few months, but for years and years after being released."
Perhaps because local Cambodians are beginning to see events that initially felt like victories — Padilla v. Kentucky, Obama's presidency, the empathy of a local congressman — as defeats on time-release, they believe the worst is yet to come. They look at the current administration's record-high expectations for deportations, and feel at once targeted and forgotten — even like the sacrificial lamb for immigration reform.
"They want criminal aliens, and these guys are on supervised release, so they have easy access to them. All they have to do is wait until they check in for the month," says Kiernan, adding, "The issue of Southeast Asians being deported just continuously falls off the table, even among other advocates."
If the community is right about the months to come, perhaps the biggest tragedy won't be that more people like Iv will be gone, but what their loss will do to the generation after them. It's hard not to see their absence as a reflection of their own fatherless childhoods, and what that has led to.
At a protest outside Touch Up Barbershop this September, community members decried Iv's imminent deportation, and passed around a box for his family, for which he is the sole provider.
"Try to give some money," a man yelled into a speakerphone. "They need it."
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