At the age of 19, Sophorn San pleaded guilty to illegal possession of a handgun. A Cambodian refugee living in Providence, Rhode Island, since the age of 4, he did not know that the plea flagged him for deportation. Seven years later, he was swept up by immigration authorities as part of a wave of Cambodian removals and eventually deported in December 2018. By February, he was dead, traumatizing a R.I. community.
In his first week in office, former President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order, making the deportation of all who entered the U.S. without authorization a priority. Among those ordered removed was Lucio Perez, a Guatemalan man living in Springfield, Massachusetts, with his mixed status family. He would soon be invited to take sanctuary in a church 40 minutes away, and it was there that his “Calvary” began.
Pursued by local gangs in Guatemala, father and son pay a coyote and set off on an odyssey of over 3,000 miles to Providence, R.I., before being separated at the U.S.-Mexico border at the height of the family separation crisis. With one sent to a shelter in the northeast, and another sent back to Guatemala, would they ever meet again.
When Paul Ratha Yem arrived in Boston in 1980, he was looking forward to a new life four years after the Khmer Rouge forced him to flee his native Cambodia. But a different battle faced him and his community when they arrived in their new homes, and Revere, Mass., became a battleground against Anti-Asian racism.
