Prosecution for an old crime puts Cambodian refugee at risk

After he was convicted of assaulting a Philadelphia man in 1998, Cambodian refugee Mout Iv knew he was in the United States on borrowed time.

As it turned out, quite a lot of borrowed time.

He was freed from a Pennsylvania prison after four years, but paperwork snafus prevented his immediate return to Cambodia, as required by law. So immigration agents put Iv on "supervised release," allowing him to open a barber shop in Olney

The government kept tabs on him with scheduled interviews, random phone calls, and unannounced visits.

Last week, at an ostensibly routine appointment, Iv, 33, was fingerprinted, photographed, and arrested. He's now in prison being readied for deportation.

It "was always in the back of my mind," said his fiancée, CJ Vonglaha, 26. "But I didn't think in my wildest dreams it would be like this."

Nor did many of the thousands of other noncitizen refugees being rounded up nationwide because of crimes largely committed years ago. In Philadelphia this month, the heat has been on the Cambodian community, which has protested deportation proceedings against at least six of its members.

Behind the rash of detentions and expulsions is the Obama administration, which is attempting to win public and congressional support for immigration reform.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) is on track to deport 400,000 people this year - a 10 percent increase over expulsions in 2008, the last year of the George W. Bush administration, and more than double the number in 2005.

In the last five years, the increases in deportations have largely been the result of federal campaigns to catch illegal border crossers and visa violators, according to a February report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, an independent research center at Syracuse University.

Another TRAC study released this month, however, documented a "shift in targeting."

"Focusing just on aliens who have committed crimes in this country, the number . . . removed by ICE has already broken all previous records," the authors wrote. They wrote that the number of undocumented immigrants removed for overstaying visas or entering illegally had dropped for the first time in five years.

In a June 30 memo to staff, ICE assistant secretary John Morton told agents to focus on felons and repeat offenders, but reminded them not to neglect other categories of illegal immigrants.