The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 31 (2020)
Copyright © 2020 Ayako Sahara. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with this noticeincluded, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.

Sharing the Travail of Reeducation Camps,
Expelling the Betrayer: The Politics of Deportation
in a Vietnamese American Community

Ayako SAHARA*

INTRODUCTION: POLITICS OF DEPORTATION
Deportation has become a hot issue in the United States, especially under
the current Donald Trump administration, where it is a part of the president’s“America first” agenda. Immigration raids and detention are the primary
components of the new American “deportation regime.”1 The regime itself
emerged with the application of principles of neoliberal governance toimmigration in the late 1990s because of the surge in anti-immigrantsentiment and accelerated after the launch of the so-called war on terror in
2001. Trump has described undocumented immigrants as not only
inassimilable but also criminal to justify the curbing of even legal
immigration, besides clamping down on illegal immigration.2
The issue of deportation is about who should and should not be in acommunity. In the current deportation regime, “deportability” is initiatedand imposed by state power; further, the process has been normalized andstandardized.3 Deportability in the United States has been associated withcriminality, which includes not only committing actual crimes within the
United States or outside but also making bogus asylum claims.
The US government, moreover, has a long history of denying and*Associate Professor, Ohtsuki City College

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expelling those whom the government does not want.4 Law professor Daniel
Kanstroom advises that the deportation trend should be understood in its
long historical context.5 Deportation is not only a technology of government
to emphasize national borders but a way for a community to expel their“others” to maintain their unity. The political scientist William Walters
explains that deportation, which has taken the forms of expulsion and exile,
is an ancient practice. He adds that “exile is used against the individual who
is understood to be a member of the political community or nation.”6
We think of deportation as a major issue now, but there was a unique casethat involved criminalization and deportation for the older generation that
relates to memories of the Vietnam War. I analyze here the scandal of BùiĐình Thi, a former refugee from Vietnam, in Orange County, California(from the late 1990s to the early 2000s), which exposed that he was a guard
in the Thanh Cẩm reeducation camp in northern Vietnam and which
eventually led to his deportation from the United States. His case not onlyshows the anti-Communist stance of the Vietnamese American community
but also illuminates the power of memories of suffering that took place after
the end of the Vietnam War.
After the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN; South Vietnam),
many former RVN citizens were forced into exile by triumphant North
Vietnamese Communists. Many moved to and resettled in the United States
and built refugee communities across the country, the largest of which was
the “Little Saigon” in Orange County, California.7 Vietnamese American
studies scholars such as Phuong Tran Nguyen point out that Vietnamese
refugees in the United States constructed these diasporic Vietnamese
communities and their “refugee nationalism.”8
Many academics argue that anti-Communism is not necessarily an innate
attribute of these communities but a cultural praxis that sustains their
ongoing community-building processes.9 Vietnamese Americans have rituals
and commemorations different from the current socialist Vietnamese
government, such as having a “day of mourning” to remember the Fall of
Saigon, hoisting the former RVN national flag as their “heritage” flag, andcalling their communities “Little Saigon,” not “Little Hanoi.”10 Many
historians and sociologists studying Vietnamese American communities
have discovered that the anti-Communism of Vietnamese refugees has been
constructed through “strategic memory projects” designed to locate former
South Vietnam as an actor in the dominant collective memory of theVietnam War.11 Phuong Trang Nguyen also points out that anti-Communism
in the refugee community has been transformed in relation to changes inSHARING THE TRAVAIL OF REEDUCATION CAMPS, EXPELLING THE BETRAYER

113

US-Vietnam relations.12
Escape narratives of Vietnamese refugees have been available for theAmerican public since the late 1980s, strengthening the image of thesepeople as victims escaping from Communism and positioning themselves as“the new crusaders against communism.”13 In this picture, scholars generally
assume that the Vietnamese refugee community is monolithic. Yet, as ethnic
studies scholar Long Bui explains, it is not a tight-knit and coherent
community; rather, it is characterized by “many forms of symbolic
dismemberment,” and we should pay more attention to its internal
dynamics.14 Anti-Communism was exploited by some Vietnamese
community members to construct a sense of unity among the refugees
because they needed to cope with potential divisions, tensions, andcontradictions within the community. Accordingly, the deportation of BùiĐình Thi should be seen in the context of these political and cultural
struggles in the community.
In line with the above-mentioned scholars, I show how a particularversion of former refugee memories was employed to justify the expulsionof Bùi Đình Thi before the emergence of the current deportation regime.
Even though media and immigrant advocacy organizations criticized thefederal deportation policy against former Vietnamese refugees, the case ofBùi Đình Thi has not yet been analyzed or argued in Vietnamese American
studies or Asian American studies.15 In this article I address the reeducation
camps in Vietnam, which were introduced in 1975 to assimilate former
South Vietnamese into the newly established Communist nation, and thedeportation from the United States of an abuser who injured and killed
fellow camp inmates in one such camp. I will examine the case of urging
deportation as a technique of community building and a mechanism fororganizing, mobilizing, and defining the politicized memory of an exile
community. By doing so, I aim to explore the ways in which the politics ofmemories of reeducation camps delineates the boundaries of the Vietnamese
American community.
THE REEDUCATION CAMP EXPERIENCE NARRATIVES
After the Fall of Saigon in April 30, 1975, a process of reeducation ofSouth Vietnamese was initiated by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in May
1975. The new regime ordered various groups of South Vietnamese toregister for reeducation. In June, soldiers, noncommissioned officers, andrank-and file personnel of the former RVN were asked to undergo a three-

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day reeducation. Others were to be confined to the sites of reeducation until
the course ended. At that time, “the government gave the clear impressionthat the reform study would last no more than a month for even the highest
ranking officers and officials of the former government in South Vietnam,
and ten days for lower-ranking officers and officials.”16 Nevertheless, very
few of these officials were released within that period. The former membersof the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) accounted for the majorityof those with the longest sentences, and the last detainees were freed only in
1992.17Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese former officials and soldiers,
as well as college students, were sent to the camps, where most of theofficials were detained for many years under harsh conditions, including
hard labor and limited food. The annual mortality rate among reeducation
detainees was estimated to be 10–15 percent during 1975–79.18 Thus,
Vietnamese not only in Vietnam but also those overseas who had family
members and friends in the camps were concerned about the situation;
however, the existence of reeducation camps and the lives of camp detainees
were not well known in US society in the late 1970s. The American public
did not pay much attention to the reeducation camps after the Vietnam
conflict ended.
Memories of experiences in the reeducation camps have been widely
shared among Vietnamese since the 1980s through cultural productions,such as movies, novels, and memoirs.19 Narratives by former camp prisoners
became an integral part of Vietnamese American history because they areevidence of the cruelty of Communist Vietnam, which provides these former
prisoners the right to claim asylum in the United States. The reeducation
camp experiences are not only personal accounts but also collective ones,
since the prisoners survived terrible state persecution that earlier refugees
were able to avoid.20 Accordingly, the narratives of the earlier refugees andthe camp survivors became interconnected in constructing the communal
memory of sufferings of former South Vietnamese.
In the following, I introduce some narratives of reeducation camps fromthe Vietnamese American Oral History Project at the University ofCalifornia, Irvine, which was created in 2011 to collect individual
experiences of Vietnamese Americans.21 These narratives are full of
descriptions of hardships they experienced during their time in the camps
and before leaving Vietnam. For example, when the Vietnam War ended, thecollapse of the government led to tough living conditions for the people of
the South. Nguyễn Đan (1948–), an army veteran, described his situation at

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that time:
Some had to leave the country by boats and ferries; some in the city
had the means to do so but did not know where to go. I ran to the docks
searching for boats and vessels, but they were no longer there, so we
had to stay behind and live. After about a month, there was an order toattend training courses or else go to jail. So, we had to obey them andwent. Staying at home was not an option.22
His account shows how desperate the situation was for people in the South;
they had almost no prospects. Nguyễn Đan wanted to leave the country but
could not because he had no means to do so. Further, he had to go to areeducation camp, which he called “jail.” He thinks that they “used the term
‘reform,’ but, in fact, it was like being imprisoned.” He continued:
At that time, a month or two after the Vietnamese Communists
occupied the South, virtually all former Vietnamese followers of theformer regime were captured. All were sent to reform prison. The
Communists searched each house and, then, arrested everyone. Like
everyone else, I was taken away. I was first told that because my rank
was that of a captain, I would only be gone for ten days and, then,returned home. I told myself, “Just go, it will be alright.” I believed thetalk about ten days, for what it was worth, and left. Who knew it would
go on endlessly? After ten days, even a month, I had still not been told
about a return date. They put us into training and made us learn this andthat. They distributed seeds. Then we realized, “Oh damn, we got
tricked!”23Nguyễn Đan felt that he was taken to a reeducation camp by deceit, as he
was first told that he would be there for only ten days. He eventually spent
four years in the camp; after escaping from it, he tried to leave the country
seven times. The length of imprisonment mattered because his life in thecamp was completely controlled by his captors.
Nguyễn Vân Lành (1941–) also felt that he had been tricked into
reeducation camp since he spent eight years there. He says: “But that was
just a lure. After one month, we were sent to prison. Some people stayed
there for twelve to fifteen years, not one month. No one came home after amonth. That was a trick used by the Communists.”24 He thinks that thepromised short-term reeducation was “a trick” of the Communists to

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imprison people of the South. Indefinite imprisonment was even more
intolerable for them than being treated as second-class citizen after the war.
While the conditions of the reeducation camps varied widely, regarding
certain features of the camps there was a similar camp routine. There was anemphasis on political indoctrination and mandatory “confessions” during theearly stages of reeducation.25 Camp prisoners were subjected to intensive
political indoctrination by being lectured on the crimes of “American
imperialism,” the glory of labor, the inevitability of the victory of Vietnam,
and the generosity of the new government toward those who resisted theenemy during the war. After being lectured by political cadres, they would
discuss the lesson in smaller groups and write essays summarizing it.
Another feature of reeducation that continued throughout one’s
imprisonment involved confession of past wrongdoings. All prisoners in thecamps were required to write confessions, no matter how insignificant their
misconduct had been.
ESTABLISHMENT OF THE HUMANITARIAN OPERATIONS PROGRAM
Groups of people in the United States who knew about the situation
protested the abuses perpetrated by the newly established Vietnamese
government. These included the Virginia-based Families of VietnamesePolitical Prisoners Association (FVPPA) and other human rights advocacy
groups, such as the Aurora Foundation, which was established by Ginetta
Sagan, a well-known Amnesty International activist. These two groups
became famous for their advocacy activities that led to the establishment of
the Humanitarian Operations (HO) program.
The HO program, formally known as the Special Release Reeducation
Center Detainee Resettlement Program, is a US federal special migration
program for former reeducation camp detainees and their close family
members under the already established Orderly Departure Program.26 The
Orderly Departure Program was based on an agreement with the Vietnamese
government to allow many of the former detainees to leave the country
because the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees negotiated toameliorate the situation of “boat people” fleeing Vietnam by boat.27 Reports
about drownings and piracy created growing global concern for the boat
people in the late 1970s; between 1978 and the mid-1980s, approximately
two million Vietnamese fled the country by boat. In 1989, Robert Lloyd
Funseth, US senior deputy assistant Secretary of State and acting director of
the Bureau for Refugee Programs, negotiated with the government of theSHARING THE TRAVAIL OF REEDUCATION CAMPS, EXPELLING THE BETRAYER

117

Socialist Republic of Vietnam to allow for emigration of former reeducation
camp prisoners to the United States.28 Thus, the HO program wasestablished to grant immigration to the United States to any person who had
been imprisoned in a reeducation camp for more than three years; theirfamily members could also immigrate.29
According to Vietnamese American historian Sam Vong, the HO program
was made possible by the efforts of the Vietnamese women leaders of the
FVPPA.30 The president of the FVPPA, Khúc Minh Thơ, immigrated to theUnited States in 1977, and in the autumn of the same year, she convened an
informal gathering in her home called the “support group of wives andfamily members” of Vietnamese political prisoners who were detained inreeducation camps.31 This eventually became the FVPPA, which sought to
win the release of the members’ husbands, family members, and friends.
Thơ was in the Philippines from 1975 to 1976 and, on learning about theimprisonment of ARVN soldiers, contacted other refugees and US diplomats
and their friends.32 Using her personal network, as well as official advocacy
activities, the FVPPA under her leadership forged a national movement tobring former reeducation camp prisoners to the United States.
In the process, the FVPPA made the issue of family reunification an
urgent humanitarian issue needing to be resolved. Claiming that theirstruggle was about not only freeing the camp prisoners from Communist
Vietnam but also helping the released prisoners reunite with their family
members, their activities gained much broader support from the US society
and Vietnamese American communities than the activities of similar antiCommunist activists.33 US officials in Congress, the State Department, and
the White House considered “humanitarian” all those issues that involved
family reunification: POW-MIAs, reeducation camp prisoners, Amerasians,
and, more broadly, emigration through the ODP.34
According to historian Amanda Demmer, the FVPPA’s emphasis on
family relationships and family reunification served two major functions.
First, it secured family reunification through the release and resettlement ofpolitical prisoners. Second, it resonated with the Reagan administration’semphasis on a return to “family values.”35 For the Reagan administration,
reeducation camp prisoners needed to be saved by the US government notbecause they were the United States’ responsibility after its abandonment ofSouth Vietnam but because of the cruelty toward families of the Communist
government of Vietnam.36 Therefore, family reunification with theVietnamese in America meant correcting the separation of families andrearticulating family values by bringing the remaining family members to

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the United States.
The concept of “family values” also provided a sense of unity to theVietnamese American community because the program actually brought
their family members, loved ones, and friends to the United States. So, theprogram itself played a role in concealing the differences—when and how
they came, what they do for a living, and how they feel about the UnitedStates—among people in the Vietnamese American community.
Washington announced special initiatives calling for the detainees’ releaseand pledging to resettle former prisoners and their close family members in
1984, 1988, 1989, 1991, and 1996.37 Through the HO program, by August
1993, nearly seventy-two thousand former detainees and their families had
immigrated to the United States. A year later, that number had swelled toover one hundred thousand, and by November 1995, the total exceeded two
hundred thousand.38
THE MEANING OF THE HO PROGRAM FOR FORMER CAMP PRISONERSThe miserable plight of former reeducation camp prisoners, signifying thebrutality of the government of Vietnam, justified their decision to leave. In
1982, Nguyễn Vân Lành wanted to leave the country after his release from
camp; however, he did not have enough money to escape. Thus, he waited
for some time and applied under the HO program to leave Vietnam. Backthen, according to him, “everyone tried to find every possible way to get outof Vietnam because people who lived in Vietnam, as you may know, used to
say that if a light pole could walk, it too would leave.”39 Whoever could
walk wanted to leave Vietnam; thus, leaving it was a justifiable choice foreveryone. Therefore, the HO program was a godsend for people like him,
who had paid such a heavy price for being a former ARVN soldier. He was
imprisoned for eight years, but his experience in the camp became a ticket
for him to immigrate to the United States.
Nguyễn Vân Lành appreciated the efforts of Khúc Minh Thơ of the
FVPPA because she persuaded government officials and politicians to create
the HO program. In his understanding, “they analyzed that the Vietnam War
was caused by the Americans and that, when they withdrew, they left us in aprecarious situation. Therefore, there were people who knew about oursituation, and they fought for us to come over to America.”40 According tothis logic, the United States was responsible for the suffering-filled
experiences of former reeducation camp prisoners because the nation had
abandoned them; so, they must be compensated by being admitted to theSHARING THE TRAVAIL OF REEDUCATION CAMPS, EXPELLING THE BETRAYER

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United States as political refugees. However, Nguyễn Vân Lành had to wait
for more than ten years after his release from the camp before he could
finally enter the United States on August 30, 1994.41
Like Nguyễn Vân Lành, Mai Van Tra (1949–) was frustrated with his
condition after being released from the camp because “the US government
abandoned the Vietnamese people.” Thus, he shares Nguyễn Vân Lành’s
appreciation for the HO and says, “Now I see the American government
creating programs for Vietnamese military officials who fought against theViet Cong to attempt to pay them a sort of compensation, and I think that’s
okay.”42 Former reeducation camp prisoners, like these two, saw the HO
program as reparations made by the US government for abandoning them.
Although some former camp prisoners were able to immigrate to the UnitedStates, their lives after the move were not easy. Mai Van Tra says that “inour new lives here, we still have to work to earn our living.”43 Many of the
HO refugees expected a much better life in the United States than theywould have had if they had continued to live in Vietnam. Pham Ba Joseph(1938–) was in a camp for more than three years and received sponsorshipto come to the United States, but his life in the States proved to be as hard aslife in Vietnam after the camp. He said that he “wanted to make a better life,
but he was too old to do anything. It was very painful to watch his life slip
away from him.”44 Immigration to the United States did not help him torecuperate from the war. To survive in America, HO refugees like him had tocompete for entry-level jobs against other immigrants who were twenty
years younger.45 Although many of the HO refugees suffered from extreme
depression owing to their camp experiences and attempts to reconstruct of
their lives in the United States, they did not express any grudge against theUnited States, at least not about their resettlement.46
This was because they wanted to build community in the United States.
For example, Nguyễn Thị Nhạn (1934–) left Vietnam in 1975 without her
husband, who had to stay in a reeducation camp for another four years.
When her husband came over later and told her about his camp experiences,it was beyond her imagination.47 He unsuccessfully tried to leave the country
twenty-seven times and finally came to the United States under the HO
program to join his wife and children in 1989. After coming to the UnitedStates, Nguyễn Thị Nhạn’s husband volunteered for an organization that wasa sponsor of the HO program. They helped people that came under the HO
program to rent houses when they first arrived, besides assisting them tocomplete their paperwork. After that project, the organization started paying
for funeral services for people who came under the HO program but whose

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families did not have money for a funeral. Nguyễn Thị Nhạn’s husband
headed that project for about ten years until he died in 1999. People like him
helped former reeducation camp prisoners to resettle and rebuild their lives
in the United States. The activities for HO refugees not only assisted them,
but also framed the politics of respectability for its members. Their common
past as reeducation camp prisoners provided them with strategies forsurvival.
The above-mentioned narratives of the beneficiaries of the HO program
have showed how, by conveying how badly they were treated, they
constructed an image of their Little Saigons as non-Communist refuges anda bulwark against communism. By 2000, the program accounted for one outof every six Vietnamese Americans.48 Anti-Communism was the mostsignificant cultural attachment they could maintain and demonstrate in the
United States in an era marked by the normalization of US-Vietnam
relations and the seemingly hopeless situation of rebuilding their lives in the
United States.49 A majority of the HO refugees were former soldiers who
were imprisoned for at least three years; thus, their resettlement was far lesssuccessful than they had hoped. Nguyễn Đan portrayed his situation at theend of the war:
At that time, I was like many of my former army friends. After we had
shed our uniforms, instead of returning to our personal lives, we felt
much destitute. No money, no cash, no job, and no career. Our
education was incomplete; we had to leave midway in our school
careers to become soldiers. While we were soldiers, the Viet Cong had
already entered the South. My period of service coincided with thedarkest phase of the war, but it was like that for most families.
Everyone was scared, confused, and did not know what to do. The
future was bleak.50
Former soldiers like him and his friends were much less unfortunate anddisadvantaged than other Vietnamese refugees.
There are five subgroups in the Vietnamese American population, which
are usually identified as: the pre-1975 elite, the boat people, the ethnic
Chinese, former reeducation camp prisoners, and Amerasians.51 Thus, there
have been various perspectives and divisions owing to the composition of
the individual community. The most privileged South Vietnamese hadalready moved to the United States before and right after the Fall of Saigon,
whereas the HO refugees were left behind suffering in Vietnam until they

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came to the United States where, according to many English-language
newspaper reports, they were “tragic survivors who faced just as much
hardship in the States as in Vietnam.”52
THE DEPORTATION OF BÙI ĐÌNH THI
In 2000, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service launched aninvestigation after several survivors of the Thanh Cẩm reeducation camp innorthern Vietnam identified Bùi Đình Thi of Garden Grove, California, as
one of the camp’s brutal enforcers. The accusations against Bùi surfaced in
1995 when Father Nguyễn Hữu Lễ, an ordained Catholic priest who left
Vietnam and lives in New Zealand, detailed his experiences at Thanh Cẩm,including atrocities committed by Bui, in a manuscript memoir. His story
was widely circulated on the internet and, gradually, calls grew to charge
Bùi for the crimes he committed in Vietnam in the late 1970s.
The allegations against Bùi were mainly based on the following
reeducation camp incident.53 On May 1, 1979, Father Nguyễn and four otherprisoners tried to escape but were caught by guards the next day. All fivewere severely beaten by the guards and Bùi. Bùi was a former ARVN
soldier and Southerner, but he volunteered to be a guard himself to get better
treatment in the camp. Bùi killed one of the escapees, former major in the
ARVN Đặng Văn Tiếp, by stomping on his stomach. He meted out similar
treatment to Father Nguyễn, but the latter survived.
In Nguyễn Hữu Lễ’s memoir, the scene of Bùi’s crime was depicted asfollows:
After beating me for a long time, Bùi Đình Thi left me lying on thefloor. Later, I found out that he had turned to “visit” Đặng Văn Tiếp andNguyễn Sĩ Thuyên while I was lying nearby. After having lain quietly
for a while, I went into a coma and do not recall how long it lasted.
When I woke up, Bùi Đình Thi was dragging me up the concrete steps
from the hall yard to the solitary confinement section by pulling me by
my feet. Unbearable pain made me regain consciousness, and then I
witnessed another terrifying scene: Bùi Đình Thi beating Đặng VănTiếp to death. The scene is inscribed on my soul like an image that
invades one’s skin and flesh.54
Nguyễn’s retelling of his brutal near-death experience recalls the pain hewould have felt when he was beaten by Bùi, a former ARVN soldier, and the

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anguish he felt on witnessing the death of a friend. Because he could notforget the experience, he decided to write it down and let people know what
happened in the camp through the internet. Nguyễn’s vivid depiction of theviolence raised concern not only among the Vietnamese in the United States
but also other overseas Vietnamese communities. His book, eventually
published in Vietnamese in 2003, had sold more than seventeen thousand
copies by 2013.55
Nguyễn’s camp experiences, published first on the internet, led to a surgeof accusations through articles written by members of overseas Vietnamese
networks against Bùi for crimes involving torture. Accordingly, Nguyễn
Đình Thắng, a human rights advocate and executive director of Boat People
SOS, a Washington, D.C.–based Vietnamese American advocacy group,
filed a complaint against Bùi with the Immigration and Naturalization
Service in March 2000. Nguyễn Đình Thắng consulted many witnesses, whoprovided documents and photographs to support his request for authorities toinvestigate the incident, because he was concerned about the use of
fraudulent records being used to bring former Communist officials into theUnited States under the refugee programs.56
The move to publicize the alleged crimes of Bùi came as the result ofmany people sharing Nguyễn Đình Thắng’s article and questioning why Bùi
had made it into the United States. Nguyễn Hữu Lễ writes that when hevisited California in July 1995, every ex–Thanh Cẩm camp prisoner he met
knew that Bùi was living in Orange County. Although Bùi had served as an
enforcer at the camp, he went into civilian life from the camp in 1981.
Nguyễn Hữu Lễ was transferred to another camp in 1988 and stayed there
for a year before being released. In January 1989, he fled to Cambodia and,then, to Thailand; he eventually settled in New Zealand in 1990.57 Later, helearned that Bùi had entered the United States as a refugee in 1994 and had
become a legal permanent resident two years later.58Nguyễn Hữu Lễ criticized the situation in his memoir: “The criminal has
entered the United States under the HO program and lives in comfort in afree country among his victims and the loved ones of refugees andcompatriots who left the country to escape the brutal Communist regime.”59
It was disturbing, not only for former camp prisoners, but also for membersof Vietnamese American communities to find that people like Bùi were in
the United States after what he had done in the camp. Furthermore, he wasin Garden Grove, a city in Orange County, California, which is home to thelargest overseas Vietnamese community. He blames Bùi’s presence for“bringing back the pain for many people.”60 Bùi’s very presence was a causeSHARING THE TRAVAIL OF REEDUCATION CAMPS, EXPELLING THE BETRAYER

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of pain not only for Nguyễn Hữu Lễ but for all the former reeducation campprisoners.
That Bùi Đình Thi and Nguyễn Hữu Lễ, who were the abuser and thevictim, respectively, in the camp, met in the United States again was ironic.
To start with, it was unforgiveable that Bùi was living in Orange County’s
Little Saigon, where many former reeducation camp prisoners reside. It wasoffensive to the community. The arrival of Bùi Đình Thi, who committed
crimes in the reeducation camp, in the United States through the HO
program was seen as unjust, and people believed that those like him “sooner
or later have to pay the penalty.”61 The Vietnamese American community
leaders believe that “political asylum is a privilege reserved only for those
who have been mistreated or abused for political reasons.”62 “The privilegeof political asylum” offers former ARVN soldiers the opportunity todifferentiate themselves from other immigrants. But it ignores that some ofthem came without having experienced the suffering of the reeducation
camps, whereas others had to remain and suffer. Accordingly, thedeportation of Bùi became considered necessary for the community totighten the identity of Vietnamese Americans, especially among former
ARVN soldiers, as political refugees.
The practice of attacking others in the name of the dead has long plagued
the Vietnamese diaspora.63 In the past, some Vietnamese Americans,particularly journalists, have received death threats, and a few have been
killed because they were viewed as supporting Communists.64 Protests anddemonstrations have occurred when some people believed that theircommunity was in danger of being taken over by Communists. For instance,
there was a huge demonstration in 1999 known as the Hi-Tek incident inOrange County, California.65 The Vietnamese American owner of Hi-Tek, asmall video shop, displayed the red flag of Communist Vietnam and a posterof Ho Chi Minh. This act angered people in the community, and eventually
he was driven out of business. Later, in May 2000, at Falls Church, Virginia,
Mai Thai Nguyen was found dead from head injuries suffered in a brawl thatensued after he obstructed a ceremony, organized by the local Vietnamese
American community to mourn the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Fall of
Saigon.66 The media reported that Mai Thai Nguyen showed disrespectduring the ceremony, which enraged some of the other attendees, whoviolently attacked and killed him. These incidents show the power of thecommunity to shape its experience through cultural representation andnarratives.
In August 2003, Bùi was arrested by the Immigration and Naturalization

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Service at his Garden Grove apartment for starving, beating, and torturing
prisoners at the Thanh Cẩm reeducation camp. He could not be criminallyprosecuted in the United States because US law allows persecution only for
torture outside the country after November 1994. A news item mentions theopinion of a sister of Đặng Văn Tiếp, the man whom Bùi allegedly killed.
She said she wanted Bùi deported because “he is a cruel animal, not ahuman being. . . . If those who killed Jews in World War II came to theUnited States, you would not accept them. I think [Bùi] has done a similar
crime.”67 Here, Bùi’s murder and human rights abuses in the reeducation
camp emerged as the present crime of his being present in US society. He
was considered undeserving of residence in the United States because he
was the torturer of those came to the United States under the HO program.
In this way, the reeducation camp experience did not simply provide
people with a sense of victimhood but also with a sense of belonging to acommunity and “deservingness,” wherein they were welcomed to stay in thecommunity. By criticizing the violence that the former guard inflicted on
many reeducation camp prisoners, the Vietnamese Americans themselves
were able to lay claim to justice. Although justice could not be delivered by
the current government of Vietnam, the US government could do so bydeporting Bùi. In a sense, this was redemption for reeducation campsurvivors and their families, who not only suffered by losing the war but
were also punished by the newly established government of Vietnam. The
end of the war was the beginning of the suffering of former South
Vietnamese because in the eyes of the Hanoi government, they were people
who needed to be “reeducated.”
It seems that Bùi’s deportation was the result of organized antiCommunist activity seeking to purge an impostor from a Vietnamese
American community, the result of a battle between anti-Communists andCommunists outside Vietnam. However, the story is more complicated eventhan that, because some people thought that expelling the man for crimes hecommitted outside the United States more than thirty years ago was too
cruel.68 The case against him was “coming too late” and “he should beallowed to live out his life in his adopted country.”69
Others insisted that justice had to be served. One community activist
claimed that “the Communists have committed thousands more crimes thanhe has, but a crime is a crime.”70 Recognizing his crime was a way toremember their suffering. Nguyễn Hữu Lễ wrote that he would like to sharewith all the prisoners who, like him, have been beaten and beaten by BùiĐình Thi. “We have suffered injuries that will last for the rest of our lives.”71

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He cannot forget the pain; rather, he is trying to find ways to remember it.
The issue is not forgiveness but the consequences of the past injustices. By
writing about his past experiences in the reeducation camp, Nguyễn Hữu Lễ
has shared that experience with people who underwent similar suffering andinformed more people about the truth of the camp.
Father Nguyễn’s memoir, by going viral on the internet, brought about theneed to deport Bùi to the general public’s consciousness. His personal
recollection was meant to bring justice for what had happened in the camp,
but it opened up the issue of the bigger collective indignities faced by manyothers as a result of the war generally.
GLORIFYING THE EXISTENCE OF SOUTH VIETNAM
At the end of April 2004, even though Bùi Đình Thi denied torturing
anybody, the testimony from camp survivors led Judge D. D. Sitgraves of
the San Pedro Immigration Court to rule that he was eligible for deportation
under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which prohibits giving a safe
haven to people suspected of human rights violations.72 The judge ordered
Bùi’s expulsion from the United States, claiming that he had violated US
immigration law. In 2006, Bùi died in the Marshall Islands while awaiting acompromise between the governments of Vietnam and the United States onan exchange of prisoners.73
Bùi’s case can be summed up as follows. A former reeducation camp
guard’s record as a betrayer and abuser of South Vietnamese people wasrecalled, and the community fought to evict him from their community in
the United States. This incident shows the ways in which the community
tried to underscore their legitimate existence in the United States. By
expelling the former guard, the community claimed that they were victimsof Communism and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Moreover, thecampaign for Bùi’s deportation obscured the class differences between therich and fortunate first-wave of former Southerners who came in 1975 andthe struggles of later HO refugees. Thus, not only US society generally, butalso Vietnamese Americans failed to make a distinction among various
categories of Vietnamese immigrants. Emphasizing the sins of an abuser, thedeportation evoked memories of the war and its aftermath to minimize HO
refugees’ personal sufferings in the United States and to reinforce theconcept of “refugee nationalism.”74
The deportation also elucidates a refugee politics of memory that
constructs or reconstructs Vietnamese American nationalist imaginary based

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on cutting off certain people from the community. Without sovereignty
within their community and the existence of a formal territorial geography
to claim as theirs, the community cannot simply imprison certain individuals
at will, but they can find alternative ways to punish and push them out.75
Given that, through this deportation case, the Vietnamese American
community reclaimed its past history without articulating the problems offormer South Vietnam, such as political corruption, coercion, and religious
persecution.
The Bùi Đình Thi case excited both local and international media in
Vietnamese and English for a while.76 BBC’s Vietnamese news service
reported: “For the first time after 1975, the United States deported a former
Republic of Vietnam soldier on charges of torturing and killing politicalprisoners in reeducation camps in Vietnam.”77 In the same article, Bill
Odencrantz, legal director of the US Department of Homeland Security,
stated that “US law cannot allow the US to be a safe haven for people whohave committed atrocities, such as brutal murder.” The US claim of being anation of refuge has a long history and, according to this point of view, Bùi’s
admission under the HO program was an error.
The admission and deportation of Bùi can also be analyzed as showing
the nature of the United States as a “militarized refuge,” a phrase coined by
ethnic studies scholar Yen Le Espiritu.78 The United States is not only a safe
haven for the oppressed but also a country whose military intervenes incountries in the name of helping the oppressed.79 The HO program helped
many former reeducation camp prisoners to come to the United States, but it
intensified the South Vietnamese nationalist logic that induced and propelled
the deportation case.
Bùi’s deportation story illuminates how reeducation camp experiences
could be grounds for the “deportability” of Vietnamese Americans and how
accusations of torture could be used to ensure accountability for humanrights violations. In addition, a sense of victimhood in the community madea scapegoat out of Bùi that glorified the former existence of South Vietnam.
By invoking the suffering and wounds experienced in reeducation camps,
organizations such as Boat People SOS and supporters of deportation erased
the history of US colonialism and imperialism to show themselves as US
allies in the past and present. Reemphasizing the brutality of reeducation
camps was necessary in the era of normalization of US-Vietnam relations tovalidate an overtly militarized memory of the war, because many of thecamp prisoners were ex-ARVN soldiers who never received proper
acknowledgement of their mistreatment. The HO program was significant

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127

for Vietnamese American communities, yet refugee resettlement programs
could not reduce the traumas of the political conditions of Vietnamese
Americans changed rapidly after the end of the 1980s.80 After the collapse of
the Soviet Union in 1991, the US attitude toward Vietnam graduallychanged as well, and the US embargo on Vietnam was eventually lifted in
1994. The normalization of relations between the United States and Vietnam
signaled to Vietnamese Americans the end of “the era of the boat people andAmerica’s moral obligation to Vietnamese refugees.”81 Since the end of theCold War, human rights abuses and commemoration of the suffering ofdetainees has had a greater influence on the US government and Vietnamese
Americans to justify their anti-Communism. The experiences of former
reeducation camp detainees can be considered a rebuttal of the UnitedStates’ attempt to reconcile with the former enemy.
CONCLUSION
The deportation of Bùi was a way for HO refugees, their families, andtheir supporters to reclaim the Vietnam War as a war fought between the
North and the South between Communism and anti-Communism. It,
furthermore, legitimized the South Vietnamese motive for waging the war.
This was the situation before the escalation of the war on terror and the massdeportation of “criminal aliens.” Hence, the case represents the transition
from the end of the Cold War to the war on terror, when memories ofinjustice in reeducation camps were employed to condemn human rights
abuses and commemorate the suffering of Vietnamese Americans.
In the current deportation regime, government deportation prevails overthe form of community-based deportation described here. In December
2018, Trump administration officials met with Hanoi officials to discuss apact that the two countries signed in 2008. Formalized under President
George W. Bush, it protected the Vietnamese who came to the United States
before July 12, 1995, from deportation. More than eight thousand
Vietnamese residents in the United States who escaped from their homeland
but were later found guilty of crimes would have been at risk of deportation
if Trump administration officials succeeded in changing the agreement asthey hoped to do.82 Younger Vietnamese Americans demonstrated against the
Trump administration’s move, but the older generation did not line up in
support of the younger people. There is the generational divide on
deportation issues not only because the older generation tends to be more
Republican leaning but also because they trust the US government’s

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decision about who should stay and leave as well as their own choices of
who deserves to be exiled from their community.
NOTES
This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science,
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) numbers JP18K18267
and JP18K01047. In this article, Vietnamese names are in family and given
name order, except for names that are commonly used in Western nameorder (given and family name).
1
Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz, eds. The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty,
Space, and the Freedom of Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
2
Tung Nguyen and Sherry Hirota, “Trump’s Next Target: Legal Immigrants,” New YorkTimes, Sept. 25, 2018.
3
De Genova and Peutz, Deportation Regime, 6.
4Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the 19th-Century
Origins of American Immigration Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Eithne
Luibheid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002).
5
Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2007).
6
William Walters, “Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens,”
Citizenship Studies 6, no. 3 (2002): 268–69.
7
Linda Trinh Vo, “The Vietnamese American Experience: From Dispersion to theDevelopment of Post-Refugee Communities,” in Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Ming Song,eds., Asian American Studies: A Reader (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2000): 290–305.
8
Phuong Tran Nguyen, Becoming Refugee American: The Politics of Rescue in Little
Saigon (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 1–15.
9
Thuy Vo Dang, “The Cultural Work of Anticommunism in the San Diego Vietnamese
American Community,” Amerasia Journal 31, no. 2 (2005): 65–86; Karin Aguilar–San Juan,
Little Saigons: Staying Vietnamese in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,2009); Yen Le Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (Oakland:
University of California Press, 2014); Nguyen, Becoming Refugee American; Long T. Bui,
Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory (New York: New York
University Press, 2018).
10Aguilar–San Juan, Little Saigons, 18–35.
11
Ibid., 63–64; Y Thien Nguyen, “(Re)making the South Vietnamese Past in America,”
Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, 2018: 65–103.
12Nguyen, Becoming Refugee American, 120–38.
13
Nhi T. Lieu, The American Dream in Vietnamese (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011), 22–23; 29.
14
Bui, Returns of War, 88.
15
For newspaper articles, see, e.g., Charles Dunst, “Trump Administration Quietly Backs
Off on Deporting Vietnamese Immigrants,” New York Times, Nov. 22, 2018; Eric Tang andViet Thanh Nguyen, “Victims of War, and Now Victims of the Trump Administration,” NewYork Times, Dec. 3, 2018. Organization such as the Southeast Asia Resource Center have

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129

been vocal in raising awareness about Southeast Asian American deportations.
16
Ginetta Sagan and Stephen Denney, “Reeducation in Unliberated Vietnam: Loneliness,
Suffering and Death,” Indochina Newsletter, Oct.–Nov. 1982.
17
Amanda Demmer, “Forging a Consensus on Vietnamese Reeducation Camp Detainees:
The Families of Vietnamese Political Prisoners Association and US–Vietnam
Normalization,” in Domestic Politics and US Foreign Policy since 1945, Andrew L. Johns
and Mitchell B. Lerner, eds. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018), 198.
18
Ibid.
19
For example, a movie called The Journey from the Fall, directed by Ham Tran, depicts
poignantly the plight of reeducation camp prisoners. There are also many memoirs of camp
experiences. See, Doan Van Toai and David Channoff, The Vietnamese Gulag (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1986); Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn, with E. E. Richey, The Will of Heaven: A
Story of One Vietnamese and the End of His World (New York: Dutton, 1982).
20
Nguyen, Becoming Refugee American, 125.
21https://sites.uci.edu/vaohp/.
22
Nguyen Dan, University of California, Irvine Vietnamese American Oral History Project,
VAOHP0072.
23
Ibid.
24
Nguyen Van Lanh, University of California, Irvine Vietnamese American Oral History
Project, VAOHP0073.
25
Ginetta Sagan and Stephen Denney, “Reeducation in Unliberated Vietnam: Loneliness,
Suffering and Death,” Indochina Newsletter, Oct.–Nov. 1982.
26
Demmer, “Forging a Consensus,” 200.
27
Judith Kumin, “Orderly Departure from Vietnam: Cold War Anomaly or HumanitarianInnovation?,” Refugee Survey Quarterly 27, no. 1(2008): 104–17. Not all boat people wereformer detainees or camp escapees, but it was the prevalent option for many of them.
28
Families of Vietnamese Political Prisoners Association, https://snaccooperative.org/
ark:/99166/w6v206pq, accessed Jan. 24, 2020.
29
Sam Vong, “‘Compassion Gave Us a Superpower’: Vietnamese Women Leaders,
Reeducation Camps, and the Politics of Family,” Journal of Women’s History 30, no. 3 (Fall2018): 124.
30
Vong, “Compassion,” 107–31.
31
Demmer, “Forging a Consensus,” 197; Vong, “Compassion,” 113–14.
32
Vong, “Compassion,” 112–13.
33
Ibid., 117–18.
34
Demmer, “Forging a Consensus,” 200.
35
Ibid., 202.
36
Gil Loescher and John A. Scanlan, Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America’s HalfOpen Door, 1945 to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1986), 203; Judith Kumin, “Orderly
Departure from Vietnam: Cold War Anomaly or Humanitarian Innovation?,” Refugee Survey
Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2008): 104–17.
37
Demmer, “Forging a Consensus,”, 196.
38
Ibid., 212.
39
Nguyen Lanh Van.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid.
42
Mai Van Tra, University of California, Irvine Vietnamese American Oral History Project,
VAOHP0025.
43
Ibid.
44
Pham Joseph Ba, University of California, Irvine Vietnamese American Oral History

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Project, VAOHP0051.
45
Nguyen, Becoming Refugee American, 127.
46
Ibid., 127–28.
47
Nguyen Nhan Thi, University of California, Irvine Vietnamese American Oral History
Project, VAOHP0143.
48
Nguyen, Becoming Refugee American, 126, 128.
49
Ibid., 125–29.
50
Nguyen Dan.
51
Aguilar–San Juan, Little Saigon, 20.
52
Nguyen, Becoming Refugee American, 127.
53
Claire Luna, “Man Is Charged in Vietnam Jail Torture,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 9, 2003,
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la–xpm–2003–aug–09–me–enforcer9–story.html, accessed
Jan. 24, 2020.
54Nguyễn Hữu Lễ, Tôi Phải Sống [I must live] (San Jose, CA: Vietnam Democracy Radio,2013), 350–51.
55
Huy Phương, “Câu Chuyện Một Linh Mục [The story of a priest]” Nguoi Viet Daily News,
Dec. 15, 2013, https://www.nguoi–viet.com/nhin–tu–little–saigon/Cau–chuyen–mot–linh–
muc–4123/.
56
Linh Mục Nguyễn Hữu Lễ, “Tội Ác Bùi Đình Thi Tại Trại Tù Thanh Cẩm–Phần I [BùiĐình Thi’s crimes at the Thanh Cẩm Reeducation Camp–Part 1],” Viet Bao Online, April 21,
2001, https://vietbao.com/a16980/toi–ac–bui–dinh–thi–tai–trai–tu–thanh–cam–phan–i,
accessed Jan. 24, 2020.
57Nguyễn Hữu Lễ, Tôi Phải Sống.
58
H. G. Reza, “Deportation for Vietnam ‘Enforcer,’’ Los Angeles Times, April 28, 2004.
59
Ibid.
60
Ibid.
61
Linh Mục Nguyễn Hữu Lễ, “Tội Ác Bùi Đình Thi.”
62
Ibid.
63
Espiritu, Body Counts, 135.
64
Cases include that of journalist Triet Le and his wife were killed in September 1990.
“Political Motives Said Possible in Slaying of Anti-Communist Columnist,” AssociatedPress, Sept. 24, 1990, https://www.apnews.com/387b393e7251093d25f74351b4f45a5a,
accessed Dec. 10, 2019.
65
Aguilar–San Juan, Little Saigons, 79–80; Nguyen, Becoming Refugee American, 131–32.
66
Phuong Ly, “Death Reopens War Wounds,” Washington Post, May 27, 2000, https://www.
washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/05/27/death–reopens–war–wounds/d66b0395–
06ac–4382–afbc–ab65526bbe8e/, accessed Dec. 10, 2019.
67“Vietnamese Refugee Accused of Killing,” Associated Press, June 11, 2001.
68
Mai Tran, “Camp Enforcer Not a Torturer, Wife Says,” Los Angeles Times, March 14,
2004.
69
Ibid.
70
Ibid.
71
Linh Mục Nguyễn Hữu Lễ, “Tội Ác Bùi Đình Thi.”
72
Nick Schou, “Bring Us Your Torturers Yearning to Breathe Free,” OC Weekly, March 25,
2004, https://ocweekly.com/bring–us–your–torturers–yearning–to–breathe–free–6380801/,
accessed Dec. 10, 2019.
73
Huy Phương, “Câu chuyện một linh mục.”74
Nguyen, Becoming Refugee American, 13–14.
75
Bui, Returns of War, 90.
76
Schou, “Bring Us Your Torturers”; H. G. Reza, “Deportation for Vietnam ‘Enforcer,’’’ Los

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131

Angeles Times, April 28, 2004; Mai Tran, “Vietnam Camp ‘Enforcer’ Won’t Fight
Deportation,” Los Angeles Times, May 5, 2004; Mai Tran, “Camp Enforcer Not a Torturer.”
77“Tòa án Mỹ đã xử xong vụ Bùi Đình Thi [American court finished the case of Bùi ĐìnhThi],” BBC Vietnamese, May 6, 2004, https://www.bbc.com/vietnamese/regionalnews/
story/2004/05/040506_buidinhthi.shtml.
78
Espiritu, Body Counts, 174–75.
79
Ibid.
80
Y Thien Nguyen, “(Re)making the South Vietnamese Past,” 85–86.
81
Nguyen, Becoming Refugee American, 124.
82
Anh Do, “Among Vietnamese, a Generational Divide Arises in Fight against
Deportations,” Los Angeles Times, December 28, 2018, https://www.latimes.com/local/
lanow/la–me–ln–viet–deportees–20181226–story.html, accessed Dec. 10, 2019.