A woman in California is worried her husband, who is Vietnamese, may be deported after he was unexpectedly taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The woman, who only gave her first name — Khanhi — to KABC for fear that providing her husband's identity could harm his immigration case, said she was afraid that her husband and the father of their toddler may be expelled from the U.S. after ICE detained him in February during what was supposed to be a routine check-in.
She told the broadcaster that her daughter, Evelyn, needs to hear her father's voice at night to fall asleep. The mother shared a video of her husband singing to her daughter over a phone video chat after he was taken.
Khanhi said both she and her husband were brought to the U.S. as children from Vietnam.
"I think my husband was five. I was just a year old-by moms who bravely jumped on a boat in the middle of the night and came to a completely foreign land," she told the broadcaster.
She was able to become a U.S. citizen, but her husband was in the country on an "order of supervision." He had a work permit for more than a decade, and traveled from Garden Grove to an ICE check-in at an office in Adelanto, which he did every year.
This year, he did not return.
Joseph Navales, who works with the Asian Americans Advancing Justice chapter in Southern California, said that many people who fled Vietnam to the U.S. are under the same order as Khanhi's husband. Because there was no process in place at the time to deport Vietnamese immigrants, many who may have been brought to the country without proper documentation have grown up in the U.S. without going through the full process to become citizens, while still working and contributing to the country.
Kahnhi recalled the moment she learned that her husband had been detained during her talk with KABC.
"Then I drove home and cried my whole way home and picked up our daughter and came home to an empty house. That was the worst day of our life," she said.
She said she's grown cynical about the prospects that there will be any mercy or justice for her husband under the Trump administration.
"I was naïve to think that there was going to be some sort of due process that I can go in front of a judge and share my story and explain why my husband deserves to be a free man, but that's just not available to us," she said.
Kahnhi is the primary worker in the family, while her husband stays at home with their daughter. Or, he did.
"He's been her primary parent since she was born-doing all the diaper changes. He's been to every single doctor's appointment, every immunization, every shot, every cry, every nap, every meal. So he takes care of her during the day and then works at night and on weekends to help us financially. So he does it all. He's everything for us," Khanhi said.
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