The family of a Santa Ana woman detained during a routine check-in with immigration officials has more than doubled its goal for legal expenses, which are mounting as her attorneys fight to keep her from being sent back to Cambodia where she escaped the Khmer Rouge genocide, her lawyer said Thursday.
Sithy Yi, who is being held at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in Adelanto, is awaiting word on her writ of habeas corpus against the federal government that was filed Jan. 14, her attorney Kim Luu-Ng of the Reeves Immigration Law Group said in an interview with City News Service.
Meanwhile, the family’s Go Fund Me Account to help defray legal bills, had exceeded its initial $10,000 goal and was at $21,752 as of Thursday.
Yi’s priority is getting released from detention, Luu-Ng said. But after that her attorneys want to try to vacate her drug conviction, which triggered her immigration issues, and then to once again continue seeking an application for a special visa for crime victims. Yi, who is married to a U.S. citizen, also wants to seek green card status and then citizenship, Luu-Ng said.
“We need to get her out first and foremost,” Luu-Ng said. “She has a history of chronic PTSD and a history of seizure disorder, which manifests with acute stress, and the other day she fell and injured her head, so hopefully she’s being treated for that. I fear for her safety, I fear for her health.”
The donations are a big help because, “There’s all kinds of legal matters that have to be taken care of, and, unfortunately, most nonprofit organizations and legal aid organizations are so overwhelmed right now, so we won’t be able to get that kind of service otherwise,” Luu-Ng said.
Federal officials have not responded to the habeas petition, Luu-Ng said.
Yi went to a routine check-in Jan. 8 and “they took her in, no notice, nothing,” Luu-Ng said.
When Yi checked in last year she was told she wouldn’t be detained, but would have to wear an ankle bracelet to track her movements, but that was later removed and nothing happened when she had a hearing in September, Luu-Ng said.
Habeas petitions in immigration cases are rare and a very specialized area of law, Luu-Ng said.
“There aren’t enough people doing it,” she said. “It’s an area of the law that is obscure in the immigration setting. We don’t use it all that much. Now it’s the number one tool in our arsenal. A lot of people are being detained and there aren’t enough lawyers who know how to do habeas petitions, so there is an incredibly high demand for attorneys to assist in this regard.”
Luu-Ng said she “rushed” to file her petition because she was concerned her client may be moved elsewhere far away from family.
Yi, who will turn 60 in a few weeks, was about 14 or 15 when she was finally liberated from the Khmer Rouge. The Cambodian genocide under Pol Pot killed 1.5 to 2 million people from 1975 to 1979.
Yi was tortured while in a camp during the genocide, Luu-Ng said.
“This is the Asian Holocaust,” Luu-Ng said. “And the horror of that holocaust has apparently been forgotten. What my client went through and endured and survived was as bad as it could be.”
Yi’s legal troubles began in 2011 when she took a plea deal in a drug possession for sale case in Long Beach, where she has spent most of her time in the U.S., Luu-Ng said.
Her attorneys want to try to get the conviction vacated based on arguments that an interpreter was never used during the legal proceedings until her sentencing, Luu-Ng said.
“I believe her underlying conviction, which led to her removal proceedings, was unconstitutionally obtained,” Luu-Ng said.
Yi had only a short time in high school before dropping out due to her ongoing issues from her escape from Cambodia, Luu-Ng said. Yi’s English is “severely limited” and her attorney “failed to negotiate an immigration-safe plea for her and did not even discuss an immigration-safe plea for her.”
Because Yi feared prison she took the plea deal since it meant she could go free, Luu-Ng said.
“She wanted to go home and that is exactly what the conviction got her — it got her probation, but what her public defender never told her was she would be deported if she pleaded guilty,” Luu-Ng said. “This is a story we see time and time again in our immigration communities where people don’t speak English and people have no understanding or grasp of their legal rights.”
Yi missed one of her probation check-ins because she was so severely beaten by her partner at the time she couldn’t walk, Luu-Ng said. That earned her time behind bars for a year and she was released in 2013, Luu-Ng added.
In 2016, she was ordered removed in immigration court, but it was withheld because of the law against deporting torture victims in danger of being tortured if sent back to their country of origin, Luu-Ng said.
Yi also has had a series of relationships with abusive partners, including one man who was deported as a result back to Cambodia, where he works in the government there, Luu-Ng said.
“He’s always blamed her for his deportation and he has threatened to kill her,” Luu-Ng said. “She has suffered the worst violence possible from her abusive partners. They’ve tried to shoot her, run her over with a car, slammed her head on cement. They forced her to use drugs.”
Luu-Ng said she is concerned the government will send her client to some other country she has no ties with as a way around the law preventing her return to Cambodia. Many of these deportees are sent from those countries back to their countries of origin, Luu-Ng said.
“Immigrants deported back to third countries have been repatriated,” she said. “These countries have absolutely no relationship to the immigrant, who was not born there, never has been there and they have absolutely no obligation to take these immigrants in, give them a place to live, feed them and provide services… A lot of them are poor, developing countries pressured into taking the deportees… In over 20 years of practice I have never seen our government send a torture survivor to a third country.”
Yi has lived in the U.S. for 44 years and all of her immediate family are now U.S. citizens, Luu-Ng said. She is a mother of six and grandmother to eight.
Unlike the rest of her family, Yi got trapped “in a cycle of domestic violence where her partners not only severely abused her, but threatened to kill her multiple times,” Luu-Ng said. “She lived under coercion and the threat of violence and was isolated from her family. She was just trying to stay alive.”
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.