A Cambodian refugee and U.S. citizen has safely returned to the United States, five years after he was mistakenly deported. Sok Loeun came to the U.S. as a refugee and unwittingly became a citizen at the age of 12, but faced a deportation trial almost two decades later. Loeun returned to his rightful home in California on Jan. 29 after spending the past five years in Cambodia, according to NBC News.
Loeun came to the U.S. with his mother when he was a baby and became a citizen under the derivative citizenship program, which enables minors living in the U.S. to receive citizenship status if a parent becomes a naturalized citizen. He was 12 when his mother became a U.S. citizen in the 1990s. However, Loeun and his mother were both unaware that he'd also been naturalized, and they did not receive any documentation indicating he had become a citizen. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) also failed to update Loeun’s records to reflect his citizenship status, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Unaware of his status, Loeun self-deported after he was denied entry to the United States following a visit to Cambodia in 2015. Now 35 years old, Loeun finally learned that he was actually a U.S. citizen in November 2019.
In 2012, Loeun was convicted on a felony charge for possession of marijuana, which under federal law causes legal residents to lose their immigration status. After Loeun and his family traveled to Cambodia in 2015, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) denied him reentry, detained him at San Francisco International Airport, and threatened to deport him. Loeun was then served with a notice to appear for deportation proceedings due to his 2012 cannabis conviction and had his green card seized, Loeun’s lawyer, Anoop Prasad, told NBC News. "He, at that point, was obviously really scared. He'd seen other folks, others in the Cambodian community, get detained for months and years and then get deported with nothing but the clothes on their backs," Prasad said. "He decided, rather than risking being arrested or detained, he was just going to self-deport. His rationale was, you know, he's a single parent with three kids. He didn't want to put them through him being locked up for a really long period.”
According to NBC News, while an attorney with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acknowledged Loeun “might be a U.S. citizen” and requested the case be dismissed at a 2018 hearing, Loeun, who was not in attendance at the hearing, was not made aware of this.
After self-deporting to Cambodia, a country unfamiliar to him beyond his family visits, Loeun started a new life in the country he fled as an infant. He washed motorcycles for $8 a day before starting a wedding planning business with a woman he married there, the Chronicle reported. It wasn't until November 2019, when he attended attorney Prasad's legal workshop in the capital city of Phnom Penh, that Loeun learned he was a U.S. citizen.
Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute, told the Chronicle derivative citizenship is a complex concept in immigration law, making it difficult for foreign nationals to know whether they have obtained citizenship, especially when the government fails to notify new Americans. "It's very understandable that foreign nationals themselves wouldn't know whether they had acquired citizenship, especially if they have other IDs and they're able to get by with those other IDs and they haven't been doing a lot of traveling," Pierce said.
A CBP spokesperson told the Chronicle that the department does not comment on pending immigration cases.
Loeun’s case is not isolated. Prasad told NBC News that Loeun is the third Cambodian to have been mistakenly put through deportation proceedings. "The United States, of course, may not deport its own citizens, but it happens far too often," he said. "As long as the United States follows mass deportation policies, we know this will continue to happen.” According to NBC News, the deportation of Cambodian immigrants has increased by 279% in the past two years, and many of those targeted by ICE arrived in the U.S. legally as refugees.
What happened to Loeun is an unfortunate reality as the Trump administration continues to target immigrant communities, but injustice against immigrants is an issue embedded in U.S. history. Mass deportations took place long before Donald Trump took office in 2017. According to data from the Migration Policy Institute, more than 12 million people were deported during the Clinton administration, 10 million during the (second) Bush administration, and 5 million during the Obama administration.
The joy of overcoming such horrors can be felt in all-too-rare reunions.
While Loeun’s return is worthy of celebration, we must keep fighting so that one day, more immigrant families are united than separated.