Sophea Phea of Long Beach is the first Cambodian deportee to ever come back to the U.S. under a pardon.
Phea is among thousands of non-citizens who have been deported in recent decades because of criminal records. A conviction for credit card fraud when she was 23 had thrust Phea, a green card-holder, into a deportation pipeline upon her release from prison that she thought she wouldn’t ever escape.
The only things I've heard about Cambodia were about war, about all the killing. I knew that my grandparents were slaughtered and thrown in a ditch.Long Beach, home to the largest Cambodian community in the U.S., is where Phea’s refugee family set down roots. After fleeing Cambodia, where about 2 million people were killed under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970’s, her family landed first in a refugee camp in Thailand, where she was born.
Phea grew in the 90’s feeling American: watching"Saved By the Bell" and dancing to Monica and Brandy. Life's milestones came in quick succession — graduation from Long Beach Polytechnic High School, and at 20, having her son. The next several years were quiet. Phea took community college classes, worked at a local mini-mart and TJ Maxx, and spent as much time as she could with her son, who was living with his father. But the specter of deportation never went away, and in Oct. 2011, immigration officers showed up at her door.
She later met a local Cambodian man who ran a bar; they married in 2020. She also found a deportee community,, many from California. One of her new deportee friends was Chandara Tep, who managed a tattoo shop where Phea went to have a phoenix and lotus flower inked on her shoulder blades.
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