Thu Ngoc Nguyen, an immigrant from Vietnam, is now detained by ICE in Springfield, Missouri awaiting deportation on an order of removal from more than two decades ago. Courts issued the order in 2000 following a crime he’d committed at age 17—but Nguyen was then permitted to stay in the U.S., and spent two decades building a life here. He is among thousands of Southeast Asian immigrants at risk of deportation for incidents from their childhood, which has caught the attention of some lawmakers in Washington, D.C.
Nguyen first immigrated from Vietnam to St. Louis in 1990 with his mother and sister, amidst the ramifications of the Vietnam War. He was 12. “We were so poor, we got nothing over there,” he says.
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His mother passed away shortly after their arrival in the U.S., leaving the two children to fend for themselves. School was challenging.
“It was really difficult. We got no help. Speak no English. My sister was around 20 back then,” he says. “Everybody looks at you weird or they [say], ‘Ching, chong, go back to your country.”
Nguyen nonetheless persevered to build a life for himself. After spending his youth in St. Louis, he moved to Nebraska to raise his two children, now 18 and 21 years old. In Nebraska, Nguyen was working legally in the U.S. with employment authorization granted to him by (c)(18) status. This status is granted to immigrants who have deportation orders, but cannot be deported—usually because their country of origin is not accepting immigrants. Nguyen checked in with ICE annually, and worked at a cannery to raise and support his two daughters.
Nguyen recently moved back to St. Louis, where most of his family is. It took nearly one year after the move to receive his (c)(18) work authorization, without which he couldn’t renew his driver’s license (it then expired).
“It’s really strict. I don’t know how they expect us to do anything. We got bills to pay, child support to pay, but we can’t go to work,” he says.
During this time, Nguyen’s nephew, Tommy Nguyen, supported him financially. “He wanted to make money, but he just legally could not work without that authorization,” Tommy says. “I feel like that’s a tactic to get him to voluntarily move back to Vietnam…if he didn’t have a support system, what was he supposed to do in that year that he couldn’t work?”
The move also prompted ICE to increase the frequency of mandatory check-ins from yearly in Nebraska to monthly in Missouri. The check-ins were a stressful experience for his entire family.
“You don’t know what’s gonna happen when you check in, and sometimes I can’t even sleep. The night before, I stay up all night,” Nguyen says.
Nguyen’s fears materialized at his check-in on April 9, when ICE detained him, seeking to deport based on a final order of removal from 2000. Nguyen called Tommy when ICE first took him in.
“The ICE agent takes the phone, and the first thing he says to me is, ‘What’s up, dude?’ showing a complete lack of empathy,” says Tommy. “They decided to detain him and say that he was an aggravated felon, and so they wanted to deport him.”
A statement from an ICE representative stated: “Thu Nguyen, 47, a criminal illegal alien from Vietnam, entered the United States in 1990 on a visa. He was convicted multiple times for felony burglary, larceny, and vehicle theft over a multi-year span in St. Louis from 1996 to 2000.”
Nguyen, however, says his record is not what the agency describes. He acknowledges, however, that he fell into a bad crowd. Of his friends at that time, he says, “The incident is, they attempt to break in some house. I was in the car, and they got caught. So that’s why they charged me, and I got locked up.”
ICE declined to provide case-specific information to back up its claims. Other than a traffic ticket from 2017, the only criminal record under his name in Missouri or federal court appears to be a conviction in a 1996 case, allegedly committed when Nguyen was 17. The court file shows he was charged with burglary, attempted burglary, and stealing and given a suspended imposition of sentence that involved three years of probation. When his probation was revoked, he did time in prison.
According to Nguyen, ICE randomly picked him up while he was on probation, questioned him, and fingerprinted him. He says he fled the state to avoid harassment by ICE, violating his probation terms. Law enforcement returned Nguyen to Missouri for a four-month rehabilitation program as an alternative to prison. But before he could complete it, he says, ICE issued a detainer, landing Nguyen in prison.
“When they released me [from prison], ICE picked me up. The first thing they say is, ‘Your country won’t accept you,’” he says. After spending nine months in ICE detention, in 2000, he said he had the option to either sign deportation papers or remain in custody.
Several people were in the same situation as him, he recounts. “Our country won’t accept us, so we won’t get deported. We sign the papers so we can get out. It’s been 26 years, and I’m back in here again,” he says.
Today, there are thousands of immigrants in Nguyen’s shoes, according to immigration attorney David Cox. “They already have a removal order. They just [could] not execute it because they are from a country where we had no diplomatic relations at the relevant time,” he says.
This is true for thousands of Southeast Asians who resettled in the U.S. after the Vietnam War. The U.S. did not reach an agreement with Vietnam to deport immigrants until 2008, leaving immigrants like Nguyen to work in the US with (c)(18) authorization. Now the Trump administration is acting on decades-old deportation orders.
The Southeast Asian Deportation Relief Act, or SEADRA, recently introduced in the House of Representatives, aims to end these deportations.
“Many Southeast Asian families were resettled into heavily disinvested communities without adequate access to socio-economic resources,” Representative Judy Chu (D-California) explains in a fact sheet about the legislation. “Youth were caught up in some unforgiving pipeline as many other low-income youths in underserved neighborhoods, making mistakes that led to criminal convictions,” particularly in the aftermath of intergenerational trauma from the war.
Consequently, around 15,000 Southeast Asians are living under the threat of deportation, according to Chu. SEADRA aims to permanently authorize these immigrants for employment and reduce ICE check-ins to every five years.
Without SEADRA’s passage, Nguyen’s family is struggling to make sense of his impending deportation.
“He’s a good person, minus the mistakes he’s made in his younger childhood,” says Tommy. “Who hasn’t made any mistake? No kid’s perfect. But it’s unfair to judge somebody when they did something underage.”
After his stints in prison and ICE detention in the 1990s, Nguyen helped raise Tommy and his brother, Timmy, feeding them, and picking them up and dropping them off at school.
“My father was never there for me, and he was an abusive father,” Tommy says. “I remember my uncle being the one that picked up the slack, for a child that wasn’t his.”
Tommy notes that in all the years he was allowed to live in the U.S., Nguyen has paid his taxes, gotten married, and had children. “He’s doing all the right things that he is supposed to do, and all of a sudden, they deem him unfit to be a resident here. That doesn’t make sense to me,” says Tommy.
Despite his best efforts, Tommy Nguyen did not succeed in finding a lawyer to take his uncle’s case. “They know they won’t win,” he says. “That’s the environment that I’ve seen, is that [lawyers] won’t take it because none of these federal judges will go against Trump and the administration.”
Previously, attorneys would often file a writ of habeas corpus for law enforcement to justify the continued detainment of an individual. But immigration courts have changed. As the New York Times has reported, the Trump administration has sought to intimidate immigrant-friendly judges, threatening them with disciplinary action or firing them, dismissing more than 100 of the 750 in place and appointing 143 more who are more sympathetic to the administration’s aims. That’s made any legal action an uphill battle.
“I filed a writ of habeas corpus action recently and it was summarily dismissed by the judge without a hearing,” says Cox, the immigration attorney. “That’s what’s happening almost all time. Occasionally judges will grant it, and some of [those judges] are being fired.”
For people like Nguyen, Cox agrees that there is unfortunately not much that attorneys can do. “The doors of justice are shut in their face because of how these things are developing and how widespread they are with the current administration,” he says.
Nguyen’s younger daughter, Thy Nguyen, says she’s both shocked and not surprised by her father’s detainment. “I felt kind of numb. I expected it coming, but at the same time, you never want to wish that upon anyone…he told me about how 30 people were sharing a shower and two bathrooms. That’s just inhumane,” she says.
Thy has fond memories with her dad growing up. “We’d always go out to eat, usually at the Asian buffet is what he enjoyed most,” she says. “He was really silly, always cracking jokes.”
As she finishes high school and prepares to study mechanical engineering at the University of Nebraska, she wishes her father could be by her side.
“I graduate in May, and I won’t be able to have him there,” she says. “I can’t update him about my future plans, any scholarships I get. Usually, he would be one of the first or second people I tell.”
Nguyen remains in detention, with no information on how long it might be until deportation, much less what will happen once he reaches Vietnam.
“What’s gonna happen when [I] go back to Vietnam, because I haven’t been back there in 36 years?” he asks. “I don’t know nothing about that country.”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story provided incorrect information about Nguyen’s age when he allegedly committed crimes. He was 17, not 18. We regret the error.
