The yellowed eyes of
Phal Pen stared, unseeing, as he lay on his
hospital bed, waiting for another scan at
the Khmer-Russian Friendship hospital in
Phnom Penh.
Since doctors
diagnosed him at the end of 2022 with
bile-duct cancer, Pen has been struck low by
a constant pain in his abdomen. He could
barely eat, let alone move.
His bed was one of
several lining the hospital’s open-air
hallway, where weary patients waited,
sweating it out in the humid Cambodian heat.
Families surrounded him, women rubbing damp
cloths over their loved ones’ foreheads and
fussing over every pained expression. Bored
children napped on the ground in quieter
corridors while others entertained
themselves by roughhousing one another.
In Cambodia, you need
your family with you if you’re hospitalized.
You need somebody with the wherewithal to
advocate for your care in a system where
money talks, and where those who cannot
afford to pay are overlooked. You need
somebody for the most basic tasks: pushing
your bed to the exam room, or walking you to
the restroom. You need someone to bring you
meals and small comforts like blankets and
pillows – none of which the hospital
provides.
But Pen, 48, is
alone. He’s been alone since he was forcibly
sent back in 2018 to Cambodia, a country he
left when he was just six years old.
Pen and his family
were among the more than 195,000 Cambodian
refugees who resettled in the US between
1975 and 1999. Escaping the unrest left
behind by the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime,
these refugees were granted green card
status as permanent residents, free from the
harrowing violence that tore through the
country of their ancestors.
Pen spent almost four
decades in Modesto, California, where he
grew into adulthood, raised four children as
a single father, and opened an auto repair
shop. He knew no other home than the one he
and his family built from nothing in the US.
He was ripped from
that home five years ago when he was
deported to Cambodia, one of hundreds of
wartime refugees the US has cast out over
the past 21 years.
“I was sent to
Cambodia and abandoned,” Pen whispered from
his hospital bed. “I have no family
bloodline here. If I pass away, who is going
to be at my funeral?”
Since
Cambodia and the US signed a repatriation
agreement in 2002, opening a gateway for
deportations, 1,033 individuals have been
forced to leave their homes and completely
rebuild their lives in a country foreign to
them.
More than 76% of
Cambodian deportations since 2002 were based
on criminal convictions. As of March, there
were 1,801 Cambodians with final orders of
removal on the national docket for US
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) –
1,342 for past crimes.
The deportees had
already repaid their full debt to society
when they were sent back. Many had entered
the prison system while still in their
youth, leaving in their middle age.
While the crimes that
led to these deportations vary – from drug
possession to check fraud to murder – many
of the former prisoners have gone through
counseling, attended classes and
participated in restorative justice
programs. They either fulfilled their
sentences or underwent the taxing process of
getting approved for parole. But as they’re
finally released – to reunite with their
families and to rebuild the communities they
played a part in shattering – the US is
punishing them once more by exiling them
from their home and loved ones.
They are, for all
intents and purposes, handed a second
sentence – this time for life.
“It’s made me feel
like a lost cause,” said Chamroeun Mich, who
was deported in 2022. “It was a strenuous
process to get parole. It took years and
years of discipline, of educating myself, of
changing the way I thought, and then I had
to go in front of a board of six to seven
members who scrutinized everything that I
did during my incarceration and my life
prior to that. But even though I made it out
of that strenuous process, the federal
government decided, you know what, he’s not
rehabilitated. He can’t be rehabilitated.
Send him away. We don’t want him.”
Many were deported
back to Cambodia with little to no memory of
their homeland. They were just children when
they arrived in the US as part of the wave
of refugees that began in the late 1970s,
when hundreds of thousands of Cambodians
fled the region after surviving years of
civil war, genocide and US-led bombings that
decimated
nearly a quarter of the country’s population.
Others hadn’t ever set foot in the country,
having been born in refugee camps across the
border in Thailand.
To be sent to a place
that is so unfamiliar, without a support
system, leads some to desperation. Drug and
alcohol abuse is not uncommon within the
returnee community; it’s a way to numb the
crushing loneliness. The Khmer Vulnerability
Aid Organisation (KVAO), a non-profit that
helps returnees acclimate to their new
lives, has found that about 8% of the 772
returnees in its program have died since
2002. In comparison, just 2% of parolees
released from prison in California during
that same time period have died. The causes
of death among deportees range from traffic
accidents to drug overdoses, according to
the organization. Some were also suicides.
In November, the
former prime minister of Cambodia, Hun Sen –
a former Khmer Rouge soldier who had held
his position of power for 38 years until
this month –
beseeched the US to reconsider its 2002
repatriation agreement with the country, “in
light of the humanitarian aspects of the
issue”.
“Some of the
deportees committed suicide and some have
died of other causes,” Sen said. “Their
families – parents, spouses and children –
are all in the US.”
Some returnees have
made the best out of their new lives.
They’ve launched non-profits, landed
teaching jobs, opened new businesses and
started families. But even the ones who have
done well for themselves told the Guardian
about an ache that persists. Knowing they
can never return home to their family feels
like a part of their soul has been torn from
their bodies. They feel forever incomplete,
forced to live a half-life with the missing
piece of themselves firmly rooted thousands
of miles away.
“You see everyone
else here with their families, and they’re
so happy,” said Phal Pen. “For us deportees,
we never get to have that again. We push day
by day to put a smile on our face, but after
that, you just start thinking: is this all
it’s going to be?”
Before ending up
alone in a hospital in Phnom Penh, Pen
followed a path in the US that’s all too
familiar among Cambodian Americans of his
generation.
Pen’s parents had
survived the terror of the work camps,
losing three children to starvation before
they were able to secure a way out for them
and their two remaining sons in 1981 – first
to Chicago, then to Modesto, California.
As new immigrants
with little money, Pen and his family had no
choice but to move into a lower-income
neighborhood. There, they found other
displaced Cambodian refugees just like them
– a community. But they also found
themselves fighting for the same scarce
resources alongside the Black and Latino
populations that had occupied that space
before them.
Pen and the other
neighborhood Cambodian youth he grew up with
were bullied by rival gang members, who were
known to jump or beat up any Asian kid seen
walking alone. Pen was 13 the first time he
got jumped. It would not be the last time.
In response, Pen joined a street gang made
up of his childhood friends when he was 15.
“You had to protect yourself,” Pen said.
“You had to have friends around you, to have
your back.”
Dispersed throughout
lower-income neighborhoods in California,
the east coast and Minnesota, much of Pen’s
generation found themselves in similar
situations: targeted by the other youth
gangs and forced to form their own for
protection. “They were resettling in
neighborhoods that had a long history of
gangs already,” said Kevin Lam, a Drake
University urban and diversity education
professor who studies Asian American youth
violence. “These were neighborhoods with a
lot of folks who were struggling for a long
time. You picked on the new kid in town.”
Pen’s parents had
broken up after having two more children,
and he needed to find a way to help his
single mother with the bills. As a poor kid
growing up with other poor kids, he turned
to a ready solution proffered to him by his
gang: drugs. Pen began selling weed and
crack cocaine, and started using the drugs
he was selling.
Like the other
Cambodian American gangs across the country
at the time, Pen’s gang mirrored the
aesthetic, violence and drug-dealing of the
gangs that targeted him and his friends.
They came together not just for protection,
but for a sense of belonging they could not
find elsewhere. Who else could comprehend
the unspoken trauma of the killing fields
and work camps, now made heavier by the new
trauma of immigration, poverty and gang
violence? “It was a means for survival as
well as a form of brotherhood,” Lam said.
Lawmakers responded
to the rise in gangs by enacting a number of
laws that disproportionately punished youth
of color, Lam said. States passed a form of
three-strikes law in which individuals –
juvenile offenders included – convicted of a
third felony offense would receive an
automatic lengthy prison sentence. The
Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 implemented
mandatory minimum sentencing for drug
offenses.
The result was that
from 1977 to 1997, when the Asian population
in the US tripled, arrests of Asian American
and Pacific Islander youth
increased by 726%.
“That’s
what they don’t get,” said Phoeun You, who
was deported to Cambodia last year. “The US
came to my country,” he said, referring to
the US bombing of Cambodia to flush out
communist forces – a military campaign that
left the country in a chaos from which the
Khmer Rouge rose to power. “And because of
that, I had to leave. Then they claimed to
be our savior for bringing us to their
country, but they dropped us off in the
middle of the hood and forced us to fend for
ourselves. And then they’re shocked when
we’re not angels.”
In 1996, amid
America’s “tough on crime” era and push for
tougher immigration policies, Bill Clinton
signed into law the Illegal Immigration
Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The
law expanded the criminal convictions for
which legal permanent residents could be
deported. Green card-holding refugees could
now be sent back to a country many did not
remember for crimes committed in their
youth. “We are still a nation of immigrants;
we should be proud of it,” Clinton said in
his State of the Union address that year.
“But we are also a nation of laws.”
Deportation would not
have been possible had they become citizens,
but as minors, they could only become
citizens if their parents received
citizenship – and many did not seek it,
having had enough to grapple with trying to
survive in a new country. For others, crimes
committed in their youth meant they were
barred from seeking citizenship.
“Folks with old
convictions, folks who had already paid
their debt to society, who had already
served their full sentence in jail and
prison, were being targeted by immigration,”
said Elijah Chhum, the community engagement
and advocacy director at the Center for
Empowering Refugees and Immigrants in
Oakland, California. “Even though they had
businesses, families, homes, they were being
targeted and ripped away from their children
and wives and mothers and fathers.”
The practice
continues today. Phoeun You spent 26 years
behind bars for killing a teenager at the
age of 21 in a retaliatory drive-by shooting
against a rival gang that had beaten up his
nephew. He went straight from prison to
immigration detention and on to an airplane
in August 2022, escorted by three officers.
He never got to see his family as a free man
– he never got to tell his elderly parents
goodbye.
Some of the earlier
deportees were escorted on to the plane with
nothing but the clothes on their back, while
some spent years with the threat of
deportation hanging over their heads. Others
were fortunate enough to have had family
track down relatives who could accept them,
or had been able to raise enough funds for
them to cushion their first arrival.
You ended up in
transitional housing provided by KVAO. He
got a room to himself, but the window had
bars on it. “It felt like I was back in
jail,” he said.
He could not get used
to the heat at first. He woke up every two
hours his first night, his back drenched in
sweat. Then the depression hit like a punch
to the gut. After a quarter of a century in
prison, this foreign land where nothing was
familiar felt overwhelming, overstimulating,
too much all at once. He couldn’t grasp the
language fully, and nor could he read the
signs written in Khmer script. He could not
fathom how to even walk down the roads where
motorbikes came from all directions, and
tuk-tuks seemed to follow their own rules.
And no matter how
hard they try to fit in, returnees stand out
among the locals. The gloss of their time in
the US never leaves them. “The way you look,
the way you dress, and then the smallest
details, like your skin’s clear. Your teeth
are a little bit whiter,” You said.
That leaves many
deportees feeling like outcasts in what is
supposed to be their new home. But beyond
feeling at odds with his surroundings, You
has been plagued with a painful yearning
ever since his arrival. Though his parents
are still alive, they are 90 and 81 and
cannot make the long journey to visit him.
They will never get to truly experience the
man he’s worked so hard to become today. He
will never have the chance to take care of
them in their old age the way he knows a son
should.
A few weeks after he
landed in Phnom Penh, You connected with
some family in the countryside, where he
finally found a semblance of peace amid the
turmoil roiling inside him. He was drawn to
watching the fishermen casting their wide
nets over the water, providing for their
families and fishing in the way his
ancestors had for generations before him.
Those fishermen were
exactly where they were meant to be, You
realized. And he was not.
Even
before his cancer diagnosis, the depression
was heavy for Phal Pen. He had worked hard
to stay off drugs and away from crime,
dedicating his life to raising his four
children. But now without them, he felt
bereft. Anchorless. Without a purpose.
Pen’s youth passed by
in a haze of violence and drug use. He
dropped out of school. He survived getting
shot in a drive-by. He ran afoul of the law
a number of times, serving time in jail for
criminal threats and disturbing the peace.
But during this period, he also met the
mother of his children. His only daughter
was born.
Then one night,
during one of the many heated, drug- and
alcohol-fueled arguments that marked their
relationship, Pen grabbed his wife’s arm.
She called the police. He was high, and
could barely remember the circumstances that
led to that moment. But in the aftermath, he
was sick with himself. Violence had been
such an integral part of his life, but he
had never let it near his family.
He pleaded guilty to
domestic violence, just wanting to do what
was necessary to get home. He served three
days in jail for the offense. He began
looking for an exit from the drugs and
violence as he and his wife had two more
children, both sons.
But he had trouble
finding a job because of his criminal
history. He worked for a short while at a
warehouse, and was fired after they
discovered his past convictions. By then,
his wife was pregnant with their fourth
child. He panicked about how he would
provide for his growing family. “I went back
to what I knew,” he said. He was convicted
of drug possession for sale in 2001.
While he was serving
his sentence, his wife ended their
relationship, leaving his four children in
the care of Pen’s mother. Pen was going to
be a single father when he was released. He
had a mission now: to get his life together
for his kids.
The man who emerged
from prison four years later was the man
Pen’s children know as their father: a
responsible, hardworking man who always put
them first. Phollo Say, his youngest, was in
the womb when Pen was incarcerated. He had
never met his father before the day he
returned from prison. Say, 22, described
that day: “My whole family was outside. We
didn’t know who he was. This buff Asian man
just got out of the car, all tatted up. And
he had the biggest smile on his face.”
Pen’s four kids had
been living with their grandmother in a
two-bedroom apartment, stretched to house 10
people. Pen immediately went to work to get
them out of there, taking on two jobs, one
at a warehouse and another doing auto
repair, and taking classes toward getting
his GED. Within a few years, he moved them
out of the neighborhood, away from the gangs
that dominated his youth. Eventually, Pen
would open his own auto repair business. His
two youngest sons still speak proudly of the
moment their father had finally earned
enough money to buy a BMW – the first person
they knew to own a luxury vehicle. “My dad,
he showed us that you can work hard, and
whatever you want, if you put your mind to
it, you can get it,” Say said.
Pen saw his kids
through elementary school and middle school,
terrified that they would be separated again
– he knew that with his criminal record, his
parenting would be under extra scrutiny. Say
said their father feared even allowing them
to play sports, in case authority figures
misconstrued any sort of boyhood bump or
bruise. But Pen had remained hopeful. He
attended his immigration hearings. He stayed
as steady as he could, away from crime and
the gang lifestyle that had ruled his
existence before then.
But a lot of his
friends were still involved in that life,
his kids said. With the stresses of being a
single father weighing on him, Pen relapsed
back into drug use. One night, a gathering
at his house brought the police, who found
crystal meth. It was enough to draw the eye
of immigration agents.
A
number of returnees in Cambodia continue to
actively campaign to end deportations and
allow for their return home. They brainstorm
with immigration attorneys in the US who
work to secure their pardons, one of the few
ways to reverse a deportation order based on
a criminal conviction.
At the same time, the
accepted wisdom passed around the returnee
network is to accept what it is: this is
your life now. Make the best of it.
Some manage to make a
fresh start. KVAO, the non-profit funded in
part by the US Agency for International
Development, has a 73% employment rate for
the returnees in its program. Of the 772
individuals in the program – there have been
789 total from the US who were deported
based on past criminal convictions – 168 are
now teaching English, while 12 live and work
abroad.
There are more than a
few success stories. Chandara Tep, who is 50
and was deported in 2011, is one of them. At
first, he ran a tattoo shop with an artist
who specialized in Khmer art. For almost
five years, he owned a restaurant – fellow
returnees used to gather there to celebrate
Thanksgiving. He’s now setting up his own
chicken farm on a small plot of land outside
Phnom Penh, all while working part-time as a
nightlife guide for tourists.
Few people knew how
heavily he used to drink up until just a few
years ago. They don’t know that even after
more than a decade, he still retreats to a
dark place during the holidays, and has to
go on long drives to take his mind off the
happy, raucous memories of Christmas
mornings long past.
“Being deported is
like becoming a refugee again,” Tep said.
You arrive in a new country, unsure of
anything. You seek out others who eat the
same food as you do, who understand your
traditions. You try to find that sense of
belonging and home that was taken from you.
Even after all these
years, when Tep thinks of home he thinks of
Modesto, California. He thinks of the three
children he left behind, now almost grown,
and the backyard barbecues and ball games.
He thinks of the life that could have been.
The criminal offense
that led to Tep’s deportation occurred when
he was a teenager: assault with a deadly
weapon. In his family’s first home in San
Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, where
drug deals still take place out in the open,
he witnessed both his mother and father get
mugged. They moved to Modesto when he was
12, and he became an outcast both in the
predominantly Black neighborhood where his
family lived and also at the school he
attended in Chinatown, where his classmates
considered him too dark to be accepted as
one of their own.
He gravitated toward
a group of other young Cambodian Americans
for protection. “We started meeting each
other, standing up for each other, fighting
for each other, everything,” Tep said. “It
was like a pipeline to prison.”
He was arrested when
he was 17, convicted at 18. The original
charge was attempted murder: Tep had been
accused of firing into an inhabited dwelling
while participating in a criminal street
gang. But he pleaded to the lesser charge,
and was released from prison after four and
a half years. He returned soon after for
being in possession of a firearm, a
violation of his parole. During this stint
behind bars, he began corresponding with the
woman who would become his wife. And just
like that, he was done with that life. When
he was released at the age of 25, he knew he
would do whatever it took to never go back
to prison again.
For 13 years, Tep and
his wife lived the American dream. Tep got a
job as a laser machine operator, working his
way from minimum wage to $30 an hour. He
began pulling an income from his hobby of
raising backyard chickens. They bought a
house in Modesto, and his wife started her
master’s degree. They had three children,
two sons and a daughter. Tep lived for their
Sundays together, when he’d pile all of them
into his giant GMC pickup truck and take
them to the Stanislaus River to go fishing.
Then one morning, he
dropped his daughter off at kindergarten and
returned home to find six officers with
machine guns waiting for him.
In a statement, an
Ice spokesperson said whether a person is
deported is ultimately at the discretion of
federal immigration judges in immigration
court. But returnees and immigration reform
advocates said it feels as if there is no
rhyme or reason as to how Ice chooses the
person to bring before the judge. Under the
1996 law, any immigrant with a criminal
conviction that falls under the “aggravated
felony” category – crimes that range from
murder to fraud to drug trafficking – is
subject to deportation. Yet some deportees
have siblings who grew up similarly to them,
racking up criminal convictions, and they
still remain in the US. Some went straight
from prison to Ice detention to Cambodia,
while others were released and lived free
before they were deported.
Tep had spent 110
days in Ice custody after his first stint in
prison before he was allowed to go home.
Though he did whatever he could to fight his
deportation, consulting with attorneys and
attending his immigration hearings, the
possibility hung over his head like an ax.
He used to return from working the graveyard
shift to a quiet house, his whole world safe
and asleep in their beds, and think to
himself: “I’m going to lose this all one
day.”
He was pragmatic
about it, however. He spent those 13 years
of freedom saving up money for the day the
worst-case scenario would come to fruition,
and hit the ground running when he touched
down in Phnom Penh. He dedicated his first
two years in Cambodia to carving out a place
for his family to eventually join him. He
bought a five-bedroom house by the airport.
He found a job for his wife, as a bank
manager.
But the distance
became too much for their marriage. Tep said
it was his wife who one day decided she
couldn’t do it – she couldn’t uproot her
life and move across the world, even if it
meant keeping their family together. (In a
phone interview, his wife said it was Tep
who decided that their children were more
likely to get a better education in the US
than in Cambodia.)
Tep began drinking
more and more. His wife filed for divorce.
And suddenly, his kids stopped returning his
calls.
Tep believes it was
his ex-wife who cut off contact between him
and his children. His ex-wife said it was
the children’s choice. Either way, despite
his best efforts and attempts by his friends
and family to reconnect them, he never spoke
to his kids again.
It’s been almost 12
years since his deportation. His kids are
almost grown now – he keeps his social media
open, in the hope they’ll one day contact
him. Though he hasn’t been able to stay in
touch, he knows everything about them,
drilling his friends and family back home
for the latest details. He knows they stayed
with the after-school martial arts program
he enrolled them in to keep them out of the
trouble he got into as a kid. He knows his
eldest was a star student, and is now
studying at Stanislaus State. He knows his
son sold the ’64 Chevy Impala that Tep had
fixed up and left for him – a piece of
knowledge that hurt him to his core.
Not a day goes by
when he doesn’t wake up thinking about them
– remembering their laughter, their silly
reactions as he taught them to bait a worm
for fishing. He remembers everything, but
also far too little – he missed so much of
their childhood, years he can never get
back. “I never got to fix my son’s tie
before prom,” he said. “I never got to give
them advice.
“Everybody thought I
was fine, that I accepted it, because I had
business after business after business [here
in Cambodia] and was making it work,” Tep
said. “But you always still have America in
the back of your mind.”
In
the US, the same ache haunts the hearts of
many of the deportees’ families. For these
families, there will always be an empty seat
at the table for family dinners. Mothers who
dreamed of finally having all their children
in one room again after years of
incarceration must accept this will never
happen. Children who longed to finally get
to know their fathers have to pinch their
pennies to afford the airfare to see them.
For Pen’s two
youngest sons, Phollo Say and Phalvan Saypen,
23, each day is a struggle. For almost 10
years, they woke up each morning to their
dad’s silly antics as he whipped open the
blinds and danced around the room. To not
have that, even after all these years, is
jarring.
Since their father
left, their lives have been aimless. They
entered foster care for a short time before
their uncle in Texas could take them in – a
traumatic, emotionally scarring experience
they both still struggle to talk about.
After high school, they got jobs at the
Tesla factory in northern California,
following in their father’s footsteps in his
passion for cars.
But to them, it was
just a way to pay the bills, and just
barely. They wanted to send their father
financial help, but they were living
paycheck to paycheck in San Jose,
California, where the median rent is $3,175
a month.
At 22 and 23 they’re
technically grown, but in so many ways,
still in need of a parent. Phalvan Saypen
described the past five years for the
brothers as surviving – scraping together
enough money to get through to the next day.
He sees kids his age on social media moving
back in with their parents to save up for
the future, able to go to school and
discover a purpose in their lives. They
can’t ever have that, he realized. They have
no parent they can rely on in the US. “We
just have to basically figure out ways to do
things on our own,” Saypen said.
And then came their
father’s cancer diagnosis.
In December 2022, a
sudden pain in Pen’s abdomen stopped him in
his tracks. His skin and eyes turned yellow.
He couldn’t catch his breath. It hurt to
eat, and the formerly muscular man began
dropping pounds at an alarming rate – yet
his stomach swelled as if he were pregnant.
Pen sought medical
treatment immediately, but so much was lost
in translation, between the Khmer, the
French in which Cambodian doctors are
trained, and the medical jargon. Doctors
told him at first that they had found “meat”
in his liver – according to his medical
records, it was a 1.4cm mass in one of the
bile ducts that would steadily grow to 7cm
in just a few months – a tumor.
They told him first
that he had 20 days to live, then six
months, then possibly years – only if he
kept returning to the hospital for the
costly treatment of getting his stomach
drained of built-up fluid. Doctors needed to
remove the mass in Pen’s liver – but they
warned Pen that if he got the procedure done
in Cambodia, he would probably die. They
advised him to go to Thailand for treatment
– westerners living in Cambodia are often
advised to seek medical treatment in
Thailand instead, as the country’s medical
facilities do not meet international
standards.
Pen did not have the
money for that. It cost him $170 a night
whenever he needed a hospital stay. He had
to pay a friend of his family $150 a month
to help care for him and to act as his
family when he needed to go in for tests or
treatments. It cost another $300 to drain
his stomach.
As a security guard,
he earned only about $350 a month, and once
he got sick, he was too weak and in too much
pain to continue working. His kids wanted to
help, but there was only so much they could
do. His youngest sons were living paycheck
to paycheck. His daughter just had her third
child, and his oldest son was struggling as
well, dealing with a newborn with medical
issues.
Looking back on his
life, Pen regretted all his wrongdoings. But
for the life of him, he could not think of
any crime he committed that would have
warranted such a torturous and painful
sentence as this.
He had paid for all
his crimes, serving time in prison and on
probation. In deporting him, the US
government sentenced him a second time –
this time to death.
Phal Pen spent his
48th birthday in the hospital, calling his
four kids on video chat from his hospital
bed. His two oldest had their own cakes on
the call to celebrate their father. Later,
his grandson tried to feed him crackers
through the screen, eliciting a wan smile
across his gaunt face.
A few weeks later,
Pen passed away in his sleep.
Pen had feared dying,
but more than anything, he feared dying
before he could be reunited with his
children. He died yearning not for anything
splashy like their summer vacations to
Yosemite, but for everyday life with them;
reminiscing about surprising them with fast
food after school, and taking them shopping
for essentials – the little things that
don’t mean anything until they’re gone.
He spent his last
months alive in tremendous emotional and
physical pain, wanting to go home and be
with his children again.
In the end, Pen will
get to do what so few deportees have been
able to achieve. Once his kids raise the
funds, they will fulfill their father’s
dying wish to return home to the US – in the
form of ashes to be divided between the four
of them.
This reporting was
supported by the
International Women’s Media Foundation’s
Howard G Buffett Fund for Women Journalists
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