Vietnam War refugees have lived in America for decades. Trump reportedly wants to deport them.
President Trump's administration is again ramping up its anti-refugee efforts. And this time, people who fled the Vietnam War are in the crosshairs.
Vietnam and the U.S. established diplomatic ties in 1995, and immigrants who arrived in America before then were protected from deportation under a 2008 agreement. But the Trump administration now believes the agreement doesn't actually protect them, a spokesperson for Hanoi's U.S. embassy tells The Atlantic, and it might start sending some of them back.
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This latest refugee crackdown came as Trump officials met with Washington's Vietnamese embassy, with an advocacy group telling The Atlantic they discussed reworking the 2008 agreement. A previous reinterpretation of the deal under Trump decided its protections didn't apply to "pre-1995 arrivals with criminal convictions," The Atlantic writes. A handful of Vietnamese immigrants were deported after the August decision.
Officials from Vietnam and the U.S. protested the change, and both countries' governments tried to reason further with the White House, America's ambassador to Vietnam through October of this year says. But Trump officials are still moving to strip the 2008 deal's protections from all pre-1995 immigrants — many of whom fled the Vietnam War and have obviously lived in America for decades.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said "we have 5,000 convicted criminal aliens from Vietnam with final orders of removal" and "it's a priority of this administration to remove" them. Read more at The Atlantic.
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