Woman condemns Vietnamese husband’s deportation to South Sudan

A woman in Pierce County, Washington state, has expressed outrage after her husband was unexpectedly deported to South Sudan instead of Vietnam as planned.

Tuan Thanh Phan came to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1991 at age 9 with legal permanent residence status. In 2000, he was convicted of first-degree murder and second-degree assault following a gang-related shooting that injured a bystander, resulting in approximately 25 years in prison. His green card was revoked in 2009 during his sentence, leading to a deportation order.

ICE took him into custody on his March 3 release and transferred him from the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma to a Texas immigration facility. In a May 21 press release, the Department of Homeland Security labeled him and his fellow deportees “uniquely barbaric monsters who present a clear and present threat to the safety of the American people.”

Ngoc Phan, 40, had prepared extensively for her husband’s anticipated deportation to Vietnam, collecting luggage, arranging family pickup abroad and planning to reunite with him within three to five years to begin fresh. “We’ve accepted it. We planned for it, and we were looking forward to it,” she told NPR.

But on May 20, ICE agents collected her husband and others, first indicating South Africa as the destination, then switching to South Sudan with minimal advance notice. “I’m angry about it,” she said. “They want to call him a barbaric monster without really understanding the details of his case … He [already] did 25 years.”

Phan’s deportation is part of the Trump administration’s strategy to send immigrants to third countries when their home nations would not accept them. Vietnam has historically limited acceptance of deportees, though it signed a 2020 agreement making it easier to accept those who arrived before 1995 — ideally including Phan’s situation.

Federal judge Brian Murphy in Massachusetts, however, ruled the deportations violated due process by not providing adequate time to contest removal to a non-origin country. Murphy ordered the men be given credible fear interviews while detained at a U.S. military base in Djibouti, where they remain as the administration appeals to the Supreme Court.

Ngoc says she has not been able to contact her husband since his departure. The Supreme Court has given lawyers until June 4 to respond to the government’s appeal.