GONZÁLEZ: Hey everybody. You’re listening to Mosaic. I’m Ana González. Last episode started with a single word: deportation. I talked about how the fear of deportation is not just limited to people who come to this country illegally. Last episode ended with 18-year-old Cambodian refugee Pov Pech heading off to prison in Rhode Island for assault and weapons charges. Today, we connect the dots. How does someone go from refugee to criminal to deportee over the span of 40 years? To begin to answer that, we need to go to a small apartment in Lowell, Massachusetts.

GONZÁLEZ: Can you tell me a little bit about Lowell?

BORI: I mean, it’s warm and cozy because every corner you turn to, there's us, one of us there.

GONZÁLEZ: This is Pov’s sister-in-law, Bori. She’s sitting cross-legged on a bed next to Pov’s mother, Mokry. She’s sitting cross-legged, too, her silky silver hair tucked behind her ears and a solemn look on her face. Mokry only speaks Khmer, so Bori is translating for us. Both Bori and Mokry are telling me about how they moved to Lowell in the 1980s.

BORI: And I just remember just being around a lot of Cambodian. Not that much of, you know, other ethnicity. When you walk all you see your own, you know, race, you feel warm. Instead of other cultures looking at us and looking at us weird. And then you feel, like, insecure.

GONZÁLEZ: The Pech family lives in the section of Lowell called “Cambodia Town”. It has the largest Cambodian population on the East Coast, and second in the nation only to Long Beach, California. As soon as you drive into Cambodia Town, there are signs in Khmer for restaurants and businesses, in various stages of recovery from the lockdown imposed by the pandemic. The Pech family’s apartment is in a triple-decker directly across the street from a bustling Cambodian market.

It’s definitely a working-class, immigrant community. But, at the end of the day, it’s a comfortable place where Mokry can get by only speaking only in Khmer and where families like the Pechs stay to raise their next generation. So, when Pov got arrested in 1990 for opening fire on Central High School in Providence, Rhode Island, his family didn’t understand what happened.

BORI: Everybody was shocked because we didn't know that he was gonna be in that route. Doing that situation. We don't know what trigger his mind.

GONZÁLEZ: Mokry is in Lowell when her son is arrested. She attends his trial, but without knowing English or how the court system works in the United States, she had no idea how to help Pov. When he begins his sentence at Cranston ACI, Mokry makes the hour-long drive to visit as often as she can, but Pov has other plans.

BORI: He told his mom, never contact him in jail. Let him be. He did what he did. Phone calls once a month is fine, but don't visit him. He just said that he's fine in there. So you know, the first couple weeks is always visits and visits. Phone calls, phone calls, and then all sudden he just told his mom, “No. Don't visit me again. Save your money. You know, save your time.”

GONZÁLEZ: Together with the trial and the actual sentence, Pov serves roughly 6 years in prison. When he’s released, he doesn’t tell anyone. He takes a bus from Cranston, Rhode Island to Lowell, where he walks to his mother’s house, and knocks on the door.

POV: I don't think I was like, learn my lesson or anything because to be honest with you, to be truthful, because I was raised and grow up in jail.

GONZÁLEZ: That’s Pov, talking to me on the phone from his apartment in Cambodia, where we met him in part I. He’s been living there for the last year since he was deported.

POV: I never really have time for any long time to be on the street. So I was raised and grew up in jail since I was like 16 years old until I was like 21. And then I got out. So when I got out, just like everything, it doesn't really hit me. I didn't really feel anything. Sometimes, to be honest, you when I was on, on a street when I was in United States, when I get upset or mad, and I always, like, want to go back to jail. I don't know why.

GONZÁLEZ: The Pech family is tight-knit. They have each others’ backs no matter what. Despite Pov rejecting their support while he was incarcerated, the Pechs take him back in when he’s released. His mother lets him move in with her. And his older brothers set him up with a job at their asbestos removal company. Pov has a chance to start over. But old habits die hard.

BORI: He was selling drugs. Yeah, he was selling drugs, but not enough to have a mansion.

GONZÁLEZ: Money at the asbestos removal job is slow. Pov claims he couldn’t get any other work because of his convictions. He sees his old friends from Lowell doing it, so he gets involved.

GONZÁLEZ: How much money were you making selling drugs?

POV: It depends on, like, people, stuff like where they come up with money. Probably like 50 dollar or 100 dollars. A day.

GONZÁLEZ: So you weren't like a big time drug dealer?

POV: No, no, no, just something for me. But every time I make the money, I go eat.

GONZÁLEZ: Pov never gets arrested for selling drugs in his neighborhood. But technically, he could have been deported then.

BETHANY: So oftentimes, when people plead guilty to crimes, and then they're serving time in prison, while they’re in prison, during that period, they're also placed into removal proceedings. And they can be ordered removed by the immigration judge during that period.

GONZÁLEZ: This is Bethany Li, an immigration lawyer and Director of the Asian Outreach Unit of Greater Boston Legal Services. She explains that these removal proceedings don’t just apply to undocumented immigrants: legal immigrants can be deported if they’ve committed a crime of “moral turpitude,” a term that’s been in use since the 1800s. The list of these crimes is long, and assault with intent to murder is definitely towards the top. So, Pov should be deported while he’s serving time, but he’s not. He’s out of prison for four years with no deportation order because the US does not have a deportation agreement with Cambodia. That is, until this happens: NEWS CLIP: It’s 8:52 here in New York. I’m Bryant Gumbel. We understand that there has been a plane crash on the southern tip of Manhattan. You’re looking at the World Trade Center. We understand that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center [fades out].

GONZÁLEZ: 9/11 changes the entire US system of immigration. The Bush administration shifts the government’s focus from letting immigrants in to kicking immigrants out. In 2002, the United States signed a repatriation agreement with Cambodia. For the first time, the US could now deport Cambodians living in the US back to Cambodia, if they had legal grounds. So, after four years out of prison, Pov gets picked up by immigration.

POV: They brought me to Hartford Connecticut Immigration, the holding facility. And I remember that they came and talk to me. It was me and it was a couple Cambodian, a couple Vietnamese people. And they came to talk to us and talk to me, really. They telling me that “Listen, if you sign the paper to go back to your country, once you sign it, and if they don't take you back in 90 days, they have to release you unsupervised.” So I did it. And everybody did that.

GONZÁLEZ: Pov is held for 3 months at the immigration center in Connecticut, but eventually, he’s released under the provision that he checks in with immigration officials in Boston every month. This is called an “order of supervision”, and it signals that Pov’s deportation was ordered but that Cambodia wasn’t accepting as many deported people as the US was trying to send them. So, Pov is essentially free to go.

GONZÁLEZ: Did you know at this point that doing this kind of crime and serving time could affect your immigration status?

POV: No, I don't. I never know anything about that.

GONZÁLEZ: Bethany says, this happens all the time.

BETHANY: They go about their lives after they've been detained and/or deported in the same way that you or I would, except they had to check in with ICE. Especially they're doing it for like 20 years, it doesn't strike them as like, “Oh, I've been ordered deported.”

GONZÁLEZ: Pov goes back to living in Lowell and working with his brothers. But his life is far from normal. Local law enforcement is watching his every move.

POV: The whole police station in Lowell, they know me. The whole police station in Providence know me. Even I just be hanging out standing outside with my brother or my nephew. They come harass me, like detectives and stuff. They just come and question me and it made me feel disappointed and sad because... and I did, you know, explain to them every time, “Listen, you know, I was young. I did mistake. I live with my mistake” I always tell them stuff like that, but they didn’t really care because probably I’m the first one, my name come up. Even though it was not me, you know?

GONZÁLEZ: This type of heavy police surveillance is not unique to Pov and his family. Between 1975 and 1994, the United States accepted around 158,000 Cambodian refugees, but there wasn’t a system in place to help resettle these families. There were financial issues. And trauma from the war. And by the 1990’s, Southeast Asian teens, especially refugees from Cambodia, are getting into more and more trouble with law enforcement. That created a trend.

STEVEN: The refugee camp to hyper ghetto to school to prison to deportation pipeline.

GONZÁLEZ: That’s Steven Dy. He’s one of the directors of the Providence Youth Student Movement, or PrSYM. It’s a nonprofit that was founded in the early 2000s to support Southeast Asian young people who, like Pov, had extremely difficult childhoods.

Kids came to this country traumatized, their families were settled in extremely impoverished neighborhoods, and they were sent to schools that did not know how to teach them. The odds were stacked against them. A lot of these kids, once they became teenagers, started getting into trouble. Sound familiar? In response, Dy claims police in Providence started making a database of these teenagers, and referring to them as gang members.

STEVEN: When people are put onto it, they're at higher risk of being charged for a crime. And there's even policies that add much, much more time just for simply being on that database. There's no clear way of understanding who is actually a gang member and who is not. Before, there was no due process to it, people didn't even know they were on it. There was no way to get off of it. And it was just a tool to terrorize our community.

GONZÁLEZ: It was only this year, 2020, that PrSYM won a lawsuit against the Providence Police Department to dissolve the gang database on the basis of racial discrimination. Up in Lowell, Bori remembers how that mentality affected her family.

BORI: Growing up in Lowell, all the brothers was known as gangs. If one got in trouble, the whole police know the other brothers, so the police will pick on them.

GONZÁLEZ: None of the Pech brothers were ever in a gang. At least, as far as they’re telling me. But even their mother would get stopped by police on her way to the market. They ask her about Pov, where he is, how he’s doing. She never answers. Meanwhile, Pov is continuing to live his life. He’s working, hanging out with friends and family, dealing on the side, and checking in with ICE once a month and he does this for over 10 years. Around 2012, he starts a relationship with a woman, and she becomes pregnant. Pov is going to be a father.

POV: I never expect to have a kid, and I was so happy. I go every appointment with her. I don't miss a day, appointment.

BORI: I remember when he was born, he call us right away, middle of the night, saying, screaming, “He's here! He's here!” And then he texts us a name. He was like, “Should I name him Cobra? Because he born on the year of the snake.” And then he was like, “No, no, no, that sound corny.” And then he's like, “Okay, I hang up. He's crying. He needs his bottle.” We're just happy, voices, you know, his face expression. And just from then, he just really, you know, a really father figure.

GONZALEZ: He didn’t name him “Cobra”, right?

BORI: Oh no. But he did get a tattoo of a cobra on his leg. Yeah. Yeah, to symbolize, I guess.

GONZÁLEZ: He and his girlfriend name their son “Anthony,” partly in honor of Pov’s younger brother, Tony, who Pov is living with at the time. Pov’s girlfriend has other kids from other relationships, so there’s not much room at her place. And there are a lot of other adults coming in and out. So, Pov would spend the day with his son and girlfriend at her apartment and then return to Tony and Bori’s apartment down the street to sleep.

BORI: That's when we got called saying that he got picked up for something that he wasn't there, and that's not his. And we were kind of puzzled because he was living with us.

GONZÁLEZ: June 2013, police show up at Pov’s girlfriend’s apartment on School Street with a warrant for his arrest. They claim he was one of two men who impersonated police officers, handcuffed a local fisherman, and robbed him back in May. When they enter the apartment, they find Pov, his girlfriend, six kids, and a stockpile of illegal guns and ammunition in the baby’s room.

BORI: But the things that I saw that day it was just, like, unbelievable. Just can’t be his, you know? There were firearms that is overcapacity. How could he get it? How could it be located there? For a father figure, how could he have the audacity or heart to put it next to the crib, under the crib? I don't know what his baby mom said or say to him or said to, you know, the officers that day, but all of us were just puzzled.

GONZÁLEZ: Pov is confused, too. He maintains his innocence to both the kidnapping and the weapons possession to this day. But he pleads guilty.

POV: If I do something I said do it, you know?

GONZÁLEZ: Yeah.

POV: And I got framed. Because there's a case that there's a robbery and with the police and the witness testified. Re-read the record and everything. The witness saying there was two Black guy, whatever, that robbed them, and all that stuff, and I don't know.

GONZÁLEZ: Pov is tried for these crimes in October of 2013, and he claims law enforcement put pressure on him to confess by playing on his need to protect his family.

POV: And they got my nephew involved in all that stuff. The police, like, tell my lawyers like, “Listen. If you plead guilty, we’ll drop your nephew’s case. We just want you.” I don't want my nephew, my family go through the stuff and the harassment. So I took the plea because I don’t want my nephew to have to be the one to deal with all this stuff. I’d rather take the blame, even though I don't do it.

GONZÁLEZ: By the end of 2013, almost twenty years since his last conviction, Pov Pech heads to prison for the second time in his adult life. It’s a 7-year sentence, but Pov would never see his son as a free man again.

Aside from the pain of being away from his son, adjusting to incarcerated life is not that hard for Pov. He knows the routine. And this time, he actually tries to take advantage of all of the programs and support prison offers him. He gets a psychiatric evaluation, which reveals his PTSD. He takes a course in violence reduction and correctional recovery. He starts training dogs to become service animals. He even becomes Christian. Outside of prison, Bori and Mokry are helping raise Pov’s son, Anthony.

BORI: And we kind of learn, teach him that your dad is Pov. But then he like, “No, I have this daddy.” And it's kind of hard. It's heartbreaking, you know, because he’s the next generation. I want him to learn, to teach him, to let him learn what his dad went through. And I know that Pov missed that too, missing out on that.

GONZÁLEZ: These years are hard on the whole family. Pov’s brother and Bori’s husband, Tony, suffers multiple strokes. The oldest brother, Mark, passes away in 2019, and it devastates the Pech family. But they have hope that once Pov is released from prison, their lives will start to get better. His parole date is marked on the calendar, and his mom plans a big party to welcome him home.

BORI: One of his parole officer came to sign me off, say he is safe to come home. Your house is safe as long he's here, as long she is responsible for him. I signed the paper. She signed a paper. The next day he came back. He's like, “I can't let him out because on his folder, it says ICE on it.”

POV: When I got parole, the ICE, immigration was like, “Oh, no, no, we're not gonna pick you up. We just gonna take you and check you and stuff.” And suddenly they brought me to Burlington.

GONZÁLEZ: From the Burlington ICE detention center, he goes to New Hampshire for months, then to Texas. Then to Louisiana. No one really explains what’s going on. Finally, he comes back to New Hampshire.

POV: When I went back to New Hampshire and they say, “Oh, yeah, they got your travel docket. You going back.”

BORI: When I broke the news to the family, especially his mom, she just keep asking, “Why? What did he do? Why they had to take him? Is there a reason?” So I just say, “I don't know. Just they came back with the paper saying he’s not able to come home.” So, she just sat in that room all sad, which she arranged for him.

GONZÁLEZ: It’s June of 2019, and Pov Pech steps off a plane in Cambodia for the first time since he escaped the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979. 40 years later, the country is unrecognizable to him.

POV: I don't know anything about Cambodia. United States, that's my country. I lived there for 40 something years. You know? And then you drop me off here like you dropped me off in, like, an island that, you know, you have to survive.

GONZÁLEZ: Pov feels unsafe as someone who’s visibly American in Phnom Penh. His tattooed body and Nike sneakers signal to every Cambodian who sees him that he’s a deportee. And that’s a sight that’s become more and more common in Cambodia since President Trump took office. From the repatriation agreement in 2002 up until 2016, 750 Cambodians were deported from the US. In the past three years, that number has increased exponentially. Between 2018 and 2019 alone, Cambodian deportations increased by 280%. The total number of deported Cambodians is now in the thousands. Almost all are refugees.

POV: I can’t break down, you know. I can’t be breaking down, or be weak because a lot of people here that I know, they have no family like me, too, here. No family, no support, no nothing here. So we go through a lot of pain and suffering and all that stuff.

GONZÁLEZ: As Pov tells me this from outside his apartment in Cambodia in 2020, he says he wishes he could go back to prison again, just like when he got out of Cranston ACI all those years ago. But now, he has other reasons.

POV: Even I stay in jail or they leave me in jail, at least I could see my family. My son could come visit me and see me, even though, yeah, it’s behind bars, whatever, but I could see my son face-to-face. Here? I have nobody here. I have no family here.

GONZÁLEZ: Back in Lowell, Mokry cooks meals to sell to be able to send Pov a couple hundred dollars a month just to stay alive.

BORI: His mom just say, “Look, I rather, you know, send my money here and there for you just for you to be safe. I can’t afford a plane ticket for your funeral. How am I going to go? How your brothers gonna go?”

GONZÁLEZ: Now, with COVID-19, the distance of deportation is reaching a breaking point. Pov went to the hospital one night because his chest felt tight. Mokry was in the hospital for pneumonia. Tony is on weekly dialysis and needs a kidney transplant. Each day brings with it more anxiety, more grief, and more anger.

BORI: I just want someone who is working on behind all this deporting just to dig more into the family situation. More reasonable, you know, reason to get this person deported. Or give more time or do a deal, you know: I'll let you out on probation you know, do this, do that, get this, you all set. Do what you gotta do with paper, get us your citizenship, whatever. But we just don't know.

POV: It's hard. It's very hard, you know, but I don't you know, I can't really do anything. You know, like I said, I just try to be strong and for my son, you know. I just want to live long enough for him to grow up, at least come see me, you know, visit me face-to-face? Just give you know, give him a hug and tell him I love him and not just by phone, you know?

GONZÁLEZ: The Pechs want to bring Pov home, and there are lawyers and nonprofits who help Camodian families all over the country try to get their deported and detained loved ones back. But, they say they’ve been to appointments, and they don’t have the money to pay anyone for legal help. So, for now, Pov spends his days on the banks of the Mekong River, taking his dog for walks, and making calls to his son back in the States.

Mosaic is a production of The Public’s Radio. Edited by Sally Eisele. With production help from Aaron Selbig and James Baumgartner. Our theme music is by Bryn Bliska. Our intern is Michelle Liu. Torey Malatia is the general manager of The Public’s Radio. I’m Ana González: thank you for listening. If you want to learn more about the stories in Mosaic, visit thepublicsradio.org/mosaic. And, as always, subscribe to Mosaic wherever you get your podcasts.

Support for this podcast comes from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, supporting innovations in education, democratic engagement, and the advancement of international peace and security at carnegie.org.