US ambassador quit after administration wanted pressure on Vietnam to take back refugees

[DonViejo]

By Tatiana Sanchez The Mercury News (TNS) Apr 8, 2018 Updated 20 hrs ago

Ted Osius, the former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, said he resigned from his post last year after the Trump administration asked him to pressure the Vietnamese government to receive more than 8,000 Vietnamese refugees marked in the U.S. for deportation.

Most of the people targeted for deportation — sometimes for minor crimes — were war refugees who had established lives in the U.S. after fleeing the Vietnam War more than 40 years ago, Osius wrote in an essay this month for the American Foreign Service Association.

“And they were to be ‘returned’ decades later to a nation ruled by a communist regime with which they had never reconciled. I feared many would become human rights cases, and our government would be culpable,” he wrote.

The State Department declined to comment. The Department of Homeland Security did not reply to a request for comment. Osius, now vice president of Fulbright University Vietnam, a private nonprofit institution in Saigon, described his three-year tour as U.S. ambassador in Hanoi as “the high point of my 30-year career in the Foreign Service and the honor of a lifetime.” Efforts to reach him through the university and the Foreign Service Association were unsuccessful.

Osius’s essay came months after Vietnamese activists across the country raised concerns that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was rounding up undocumented immigrants from Vietnam in unprecedented numbers that left communities shocked and fearful. They estimated that more than 100 Vietnamese were detained across the country in October alone.

more
http://www.omaha.com/news/nation/us-ambassador-quit-after-administration-wanted-pressure-on-vietnam-to/article_b38eeea1-70fd-5d61-8c52-a8d0bf44f451.html

[marble falls]

1. Can't we pressure Hanoi to take cheetolini?

[OregonBlue]

2. This man is so sick. Do people even realize he is trying to send Vietnamese refugees back?

[TheDebbieDee]

3. These detained Vietnamese refugees...

Are they being forced to provide labor to some producer or manufacturer for free?

I believe that one of the reasons for DJT's upsetting of the immigration apple-cart is so that people with hazy status can be detained for several months before being deported. During the time that these folks are detained, they can be forced to provide labor for industries that can only compete in the world market by producing items with unpaid labor...

[pandr32]

4. These people arrived more than forty years ago

...and after many years of war in South Vietnam along with promises made by the United States to protect them and to welcome them to America. I cannot believe this administration would repatriate them now. Why?

Will tRump call them rapists and murderers, too, or claim their livelihoods cost white Americans jobs? What the hell could his excuse possibly be? That they are intelligent people and we don't like that here in America anymore?

Vietnamese Americans made lives here and after forty years of contributing to society they are suddenly at risk. They had children and grandchildren, many started businesses, others had professional careers, and many more worked hard with their skills and training in numerous fields and capacities, and they have become old now just like our Vietnam Veterans--the surviving ones are senior citizens.

I suppose tRump's vision of a white Christian America means throwing out people that aren't from white European backgrounds.
Good lord we need to stop this madness.

[dalton99a]

5. Vietnamese immigrants filed a lawsuit alleging U.S. authorities are rounding them up for deportation

https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2018-02-28/vietnamese-immigrants-sue-us-officials-over-detentions

Vietnamese Immigrants Sue US Officials Over Detentions
Vietnamese immigrants filed a lawsuit alleging U.S. authorities are rounding them up for deportation _ even though the Vietnamese government has not agreed to take them back.
Feb. 28, 2018, at 7:10 p.m.
By AMY TAXIN, Associated Press

SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) — Vietnamese immigrants have filed a lawsuit alleging U.S. authorities are rounding them up and holding them in detention facilities for deportation — even though the Vietnamese government has not agreed to take them back.

Vietnam has only agreed to repatriate deportees who arrived in the United States after the two countries renewed diplomatic relations in 1995, the detainees' lawyers said Wednesday.

The attorneys for the detained immigrants believe the Trump administration has started arresting deportees who came to the country before that date to pressure Vietnam to broaden the repatriation agreement.

"They are just using this as an excuse to round up people indiscriminately in the hope they can then convince Vietnam to take them back," said Laboni Hoq, litigation director for Asian Americans Advancing Justice in Los Angeles.