Bun, who was incarcerated and sentenced to nearly 50 years for being the lookout for an armed robbery where no one was hurt, wasnt transferred to ICE after he was granted early release after 23 years behind barsalthough he was told he would be. An older Black woman, she offered Nourn a shower puff on her first day as a welcoming gift: it had a little animal face sewn into its centre. He estimates that more than 17,000 Southeast Asian Americans have been subject to orders of removal since the 1996 laws passed. Still, on the December day they gathered in court in Arlington, Khoy was so nervous that her legs felt weak. When you think about whos locked up, whos incarcerated, who is serving life for whatever conviction, you cant imagine an Asian woman, right? Nourn asks. Deportation felt imminent. Nourn no longer had to fear deportation for what happened in 1998. Gradually, she found solace in sports. It was isolating. She too knew the signs. Nourn told a defence psychologist that that night was the first time Barker beat and raped her, furious that she had had sex with another man. Looking for inspiration? How her fight against this system became a fight for others. When we first started thinking about pardons as an option, pardons were so rare and pardons to stop deportations were not a thing that really happened, Prasad says. Khoy reached for her lawyers arm in disbelief. The other option they pursued was applying for a pardon from Californias governor a solution that seemed too unlikely to come true. Still, Nourn kept busy. Then, as they pulled over on the side of a lonely road, Barker pulled out a gun. Make a donation today. It was literally a receipt for her body, Prasad says with emotion rising in his voice. If hes deported to Cambodia, he wont ever get the chance. I really thought to myself, when I was growing up, that I would never want to be like my mother, right? I feel like that would give me some purpose if I could give back like that, You said. We need your help to raise $10,000 this month to continue publishing insightful stories that go beyond the headlines by delivering you the solutions we need. Was the nightmare really over? As a child, Tan observed his parents contending with post-traumatic stress. And two, Im deeply sorry for putting you through this suffering because when I was incarcerated I felt like you guys also did time with me. With her sister, she testified on Capitol Hill. She went to work every day at 5 a.m. at a teleconferencing company and then attended community college classes. He insisted that Nourn keep their relationship a secret, that her parents wouldnt approve. At age five, Nourn left with her mother for the United States, where they settled first in Florida, then in California. In 2020, 1,615 immigrants or refugees in Californias prison system were transferred by ICE. For much of the last several decades, the immigrant rights movement has tried to focus on this model of respectability, showing immigrants as being law-abiding, hardworking, English-speaking, Prasad explains. He was touched to see the courtroom flooded with her supporters: A lot of lifers, a lot of folks who had spent time in ICE, people who had done time with Ny, were all in the courtroom, which was just really amazing to see., When a judge granted Nourn her bond, Prasad was stunned. Her chances of ever being set free were slim. It felt like a mismatch: how someone as small and unassuming as Ny Nourn could have had such immense effect. His younger brother, fearing bullies, had brought a knife to campus. In Carlos Muozs case, the parole board told him he didnt have an ICE holdbut two days before his release, ICE told him to await detention. Born in a Thai refugee camp after her parents fled genocide in Cambodia, Khoy came to the United States as a toddler, never thinking much about the difference between herself and her two American-born younger siblings. And yet, as her date with the parole board loomed nearer, Prasad, her attorney, held little hope that she could escape deportation. After her conviction, Khoy moved back in with her mother. Her lawyer advised her to plead guilty to possession with intent to distribute. It didnt even matter that Nourn had never been to Cambodia, the country she would be deported to. Nourn said she was forced to drive her abuser to her boss house after she admitted to her boyfriend that she had slept with him. Tans first brush with the criminal justice system came when he was in middle school. And in the interim, it refused to release Nourn. That was part of a wave of bad legal advice given to immigrants in the years following the 1996 laws, said Alison Parker, the managing director of Human Rights Watchs United States Program. Over Nourns pleas of no, no, he shot Stevens twice in the head. They went on a date in December 1998. She points to stereotypes like the model minority myth, which associates Asians with success, not violence and incarceration. She knew that the people she met werent always who they said they were but that was the point: to escape reality. Nourn and other advocates continue to fight for a new law that would prevent state and local governments in California from assisting with ICE deportations. He grabbed Stevens by the neck. She decided her best shot at avoiding it might be speaking out which meant for the first time telling their extended family what had happened, revealing a long-held secret. They study journalism, legal studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. Nourn, whose family fled the Cambodian genocide, was sentenced to life without parole after her abusive boyfriend shot and killed her boss. Poverty forced them to move from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. This, she said, is so much bigger than me.. Thats something I really want to get off my chest.. The world felt so huge at the time. Her phone started buzzing with messages of congratulations from her well-wishers. The committee was offering ethnic studies programmes inside prisons like San Quentin State Prison, and Tan signed on. My parents were blowing up my phone: Are you safe? I think politicians forget that the 1996 laws IIRIRA in particular was passed as part of an omnibus. Khoy was featured in a documentary. So in that regard, it was hard for me to find any positive attributions of being Cambodian.. One woman told her she lives not only for herself and her family but to prove that incarceration is not final something Nourn took to heart. In the months since then, Khoy has felt gratitude and relief the weight of nearly two decades of judgment and fear lifted. At age 18, her mother had fled Cambodia on foot: the genocide there in the late 1970s killed more than 1.7 million people. Hes a certified counselor through Bay Area Women Against Rapedomestic violence is an issue which hits home for You, whose sister was killed by her boyfriend. Of course, I would lie and say, Oh, I fell in the shower, bumped into a chair, Nourn says. On a personal level, Khoys story resonated with Dehghani-Tafti, who had immigrated from Iran with her parents when she was a child and said she could not imagine the sheer terror of being sent to a country where you cannot read or write the language. She thought, If this is a culture that really does not value a womans worth, their gender, then I dont want to be part of it.. Ive probably met more Cambodian people in prison than I have ever, Tan says emphatically. He remembers that, on his first day visiting the prison, a man came up to welcome him: Youre Cambodian? So when Nourn wrote to the law caucus in 2013, it seemed like just another letter in the pile. Like Nourn, he was born in a Thai refugee camp, his parents having fled Laos during the horrors of the Vietnam War. Luis Alberto Yboy Flores knows what its like to fight the system. Despite a bipartisan commitment in recent years to reforming harsh drug sentencing laws, Parker said little political will has been concentrated on reforming immigration laws. Another member of the legal team, Whitney R. OByrne, realized that Khoys first lawyer had given nearly identical incorrect legal advice to another client. ICE transfers are a national issuebut its more significant in California, which has the largest immigrant population in the country and where prison population growth outpaced all other states in the 1980s. Basically for four years, she was nudging us.. Calling her used goods, Barker demanded that she take him to Stevenss apartment. But what is the one group that is left out of all of those reforms? Even to this day, she continues to run: it feels therapeutic to her. Anytime you bring up Cambodian anywhere, the initial thought is always the genocide, in any US context, Tan says. She was charged with aiding and abetting a murder. Her client hadnt known freedom since 2003. Prasad knew conditions in Cambodia could be challenging, especially for a newcomer with few language skills and no support system to rely on. From theAfghan womanwho fought patriarchy and the Soviets to themotherwho taught her daughter what it means to survive and the art of care, we are telling the stories of women contemporary, historical, in the public eye and overlooked who are shaping other womens lives. Im not a drug dealer, she wrote. She still remembers the shame of receiving her first B in eighth grade: her stepfather, who asked to see her report card every quarter, had been upset. Theres a disproportionate amount of support for men. Nourns parole hearing arrived in January 2017. Even though I hadnt yet committed to actually taking this on, Ny was already connecting me with and pushing me to take on representation for other folks, Prasad says. She secured a pardon in 2016 from then-Virginia Gov. I just want to have a family and start my life over, You said. Rather than spend the rest of her life in jail, she could be free by the time she reached her late 30s. They decided that a narrow, rarely granted measure with a Latin name a petition for coram vobis was their only shot. I thought I could handle it. She reassured herself, As long as he does not put his hands on me, then Im fine.. If the act passes, people like You will have a chance to build the kind of life he hopes to build in the U.S. one dayin the unlikely case that hes released. For many, deportations are so quick that families cant say goodbye. People that are like gang members. No locks. She and her boss David Stevens a 38-year-old divorcee and former state champion wrestler became close. They were together after a night out in May 2000 when a police officer asked whether Khoy had any drugs and if they belonged to her. Flores went on two hunger strikes while in detention due to unsafe conditions at Yuba County Jail, where Flores was detainedFlores said he was in his cell for 23 hours a day. In handing down the sentence, San Diego judge Frederic Link asserted that Nourn was even more culpable than Barker himself. I was still a little bit in a state of shock, he said. Estimates vary as to how many incarcerated women in the US have experienced domestic or sexual violence in their past, but one 1999 study placed the rate as high as 94 percent. Ultimately, it led her to testify in Congress and write a widely shared letter to then-President Donald Trump before ending in recent months where it had begun: in an Arlington County courtroom. News of her clients release sent attorney Melanie Kim scrambling to find clothes. The law also stripped away the ability of immigration judges to exercise discretion in deportation cases. Al Jazeera Centre for Public Liberties & Human Rights. He had seen cases like hers end with clients stranded an ocean away, deported to a country of which they knew very little. Shot at her. But as soon as the prison released her from custody, ICE agents were on hand to shackle her and drive her to the Yuba County Jail. For Kham Moua, the director of national policy at the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC), the complexity of Nourns case illustrates how even the most serious criminal offenses deserve consideration before deportation. Gavin Newsom. He had beaten her. And it came at a time when deportations were at a historic high: in the early years of Donald Trumps presidency, from 2017 to 2018, deportations of Cambodians alone leapt 279 percent. Were only free until everyone is free, she says. Her first reaction was disbelief: Im getting what! That autumn, shortly after she turned 18, Nourn started working after school as a telemarketer at the dating service Perfect Match. He joined a gang at age 13. Still, Nourn and Barker grew intimate quickly. Stuck in a module of 18 bunk beds, Nourn watched as her fellow bunkmates faced their deportations with little cause for hope. It was the first time she learned that she might face deportation because of her conviction. I wanted to say to my parents, my mom and dad, is one, thank you for giving me life, You said. I looked at her as very weak and docile, Nourn says, shaking her head ever so slightly at the memory. No barriers. So Kim rushed to a discount department store and grabbed what she hoped would fit: a pair of joggers and a T-shirt. In order not to think about the violence at home, Nourn tried to bury herself in her schoolwork. Women are cloth. Nourn understood it to mean that men had value and women were only useful in the household. Thats when I knew there was another system ready to inflict another form of violence on my community, Tan says. Yous background is similar to many clients at San Franciscos Public Defenders Office, said Angela Chan, who leads the offices effort to confront state violence. Both were deported. Women do not nearly get the same support. What were looking for is not to remove accountability from the actions and the mistakes that these folks made, but to give them the sorts of protections that really any other American has to give them the ability to redeem themselves legally without facing deportation as a consequence, Moua says. But as far as he can tell, Nourn hasnt gotten into advocacy out of spite. While growing up, Khoy was an interpreter for her parents and a second mother to her two younger siblings. Posing as Nourns brother, Barker used Nourn to lure Stevens out for a drive. After 25 years behind bars, he was granted early releaseonly to be immediately detained by ICE. So she told them the story of what happened that December night in 1998. But the verbal abuse in their relationship began right away. Nourns parents, however, continued to have high hopes for her schooling. Khoy, then 23, took her college report card to a meeting in April 2004, excited to show her probation officer the straight As she was making. She would no longer have to worry about being separated from her family, being forced to leave the only country she had never known. On November 9, 2017, Prasad entered a California courtroom to argue for Nourn to be released on bond. She had a community. They planned to use the ancient writ, which allows Virginia courts to correct clerical or factual errors not known at the time of conviction, to argue that because Khoy was given bad legal advice, she could not have knowingly and voluntarily understood what it meant to plead guilty.
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