Governor Hochul Pardons Laotian Immigrant to Stop His Deportation

New York Times

8 hours ago

In early July, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York pardoned an immigrant from Laos to stave off his deportation, but unlike dozens of pardons she has granted before, the governor did not publicize this action.
The man Ms. Hochul pardoned, Somchith Vatthanavong, 52, had been convicted of manslaughter as a teenager after he admitted to fatally shooting a man in 1988 during a confrontation at a Brooklyn pool hall, arguing that he had acted in self-defense.
Mr. Vatthanavong, who had legally entered the United States as a refugee when he was a child, fleeing the aftermath of the Vietnam War, served 14 years in prison before being released in 2003. He then built a life in New York, marrying and raising two children who are U.S. citizens.
But President Trump's return to power heightened the likelihood that Mr. Vatthanavong would be deported because of his conviction 35 years earlier. So community groups and his wife and lawyers mounted a campaign to convince the governor's office — through petitions, meetings and phone calls — to pardon Mr. Vatthanavong, a move that could result in his deportation order being vacated.
On July 1 — the day before Mr. Vatthanavong had a mandatory immigration appointment that his lawyers believed would lead to his arrest — Ms. Hochul signed a certificate granting him an unconditional pardon, 'including offering relief from removal.'
Mr. Vatthanavong was portrayed by his family and supporters as a rehabilitated man who had paid his debt to society for a deadly mistake from his youth.
'It's lifted a huge weight off my shoulders,' Mr. Vatthanavong, who goes by Sammy, said in a phone interview on Thursday. 'I'm grateful.'
Ms. Hochul, a moderate Democrat who typically issues pardons in batches on a rolling basis, did not issue a news release when she pardoned Mr. Vatthanavong six weeks ago, as she had for many of the 94 people she had previously pardoned or commuted.
Aides for Ms. Hochul said on Thursday that the governor was planning to announce Mr. Vatthanavong's pardon later this year as part of a larger batch of pardons, which are considered by a panel of experts.
The governor's office then moved to share that batch of pardons with The New York Times. Some of the 12 other people being pardoned are also immigrants who Ms. Hochul said had lived crime free for decades, had relatives who were U.S. citizens and had 'served their time, turned their lives around and stayed out of trouble for decades.'
'One of the toughest calls a governor can make is when another person's fate is in their hands,' Ms. Hochul said in a statement on Friday. 'Unless I believe someone poses a danger, I follow what the Bible tells us: 'Forgive one another as God in Christ forgave you.''
'They've paid their debt, and I'll be damned if I let them be deported to a country where they don't know a soul,' she continued. 'And to those who would demonize them to score political points, I ask: Where is your compassion?'
Her statement touched on the thorny politics of pardons for immigrants in the Trump era: By not initially publicizing the pardon, Ms. Hochul, who is running for re-election, may have also wanted to avoid attacks from Republicans, who may have sought to cast her as soft on crime and immigration.
The governor, like some of her predecessors, has previously pardoned people who are not citizens and have old convictions to spare them from deportation, but those pardons have usually been for drug-related offenses and other lesser crimes.
The latest pardons included three lawful permanent residents from the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and South Africa who pleaded guilty to selling cocaine more than 20 years ago, as well as a Colombian who pleaded guilty to attempting to rob someone and riding in a stolen car, Ms. Hochul's office said.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Vatthanavong fled the aftermath of the Vietnam War with his family in the late 1970s, as a wave of Laotians who had supported the United States during the war escaped, fearing persecution and reprisal.
He first spent time at a refugee camp in Thailand, where his mother died of cancer, before legally entering the United States as a refugee in 1981 when he was 8, with his father and eight siblings, he said.
The family of 10 crammed into a three-bedroom apartment in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, and Mr. Vatthanavong obtained a green card two years later, his lawyer said, making him a lawful permanent resident.
On Christmas Eve in 1988, when Mr. Vatthanavong was 16, he was at a pool hall on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn with some friends when a dispute with another group of men spilled into a fight outside, according to court documents and Mr. Vatthanavong.
Mr. Vatthanavong said in court that a man had threatened him and his friends with a knife, which led Mr. Vatthanavong to shoot the man with a gun. He said in an interview that the gun had belonged to a friend.
'I defend myself by shooting the guy,' Mr. Vatthanavong told a judge in August 1990, when he pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the first degree, according to the court transcript.
'I didn't mean to kill him, you know,' he told the judge. 'I just want to scare him. It was too dark, I couldn't see.'
The victim, whom Mr. Vatthanavong did not know, was Miguel Melero, according to court documents.
'That's the first time and that's the last time that I would hold a gun,' Mr. Vatthanavong said in the interview this week. 'I regret it, and am remorseful.'
The judge sentenced Mr. Vatthanavong to seven to 21 years in prison. Aggravated felony convictions automatically trigger the deportation of green card holders, so while Mr. Vatthanavong was still incarcerated, an immigration judge ordered that he be deported.
But federal immigration authorities were unable to deport him after his release from prison in 2003 because Laos has long refused to issue travel documents to Laotians whom the United States wants to deport. So for 25 years, Mr. Vatthanavong lived with the specter of a deportation order, joining about 4,800 other Laotians living in the United States with final removal orders.
He found a job, met his wife, a U.S. citizen, and helped raise her American-born daughters as his own, one of whom is a member of the New York National Guard, according to the governor's office. His siblings, also U.S. citizens, live in New York and New Jersey.
The possibility of deportation, always present, escalated after Mr. Trump returned to power in January and began targeting immigrants who had convictions and longstanding removal orders.
Mr. Trump began pressuring Laos and other traditionally uncooperative countries to take back the nationals the United States wanted to deport. And in July, the Supreme Court permitted Mr. Trump to conduct third-country deportations, a new practice of deporting immigrants, including Laotians, to countries they are not from.
Mr. Vatthanavong's lawyers grew concerned that he would be detained during his next check-in with ICE at the agency's Lower Manhattan offices, and deported to Laos or another country.
'The real fear of deportation was not completely felt until this spring when we realized this administration is really hellbent on deporting everyone, and Sammy would have been a priority of theirs,' said Mr. Vatthanavong's lawyer, Razeen Zaman, the director of immigrant rights at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Mekong NYC, a Bronx organization that works on behalf of Southeast Asians, renewed its lobbying efforts for a pardon, which began in 2020, launching a social media campaign and circulating petitions.
Mr. Vatthanavong and his lawyers met with Ms. Hochul's clemency panel. And they rallied support from a handful of officials, including the Brooklyn district attorney, Eric Gonzalez, the governor's office said, and Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, according to Mekong NYC.
Ms. Zaman said the case was emblematic of the deportation threats that thousands of Southeast Asian refugees — from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam — were facing 50 years after fleeing the Vietnam War. On Monday, ICE announced that it had deported a group of Laotians with convictions and decades-old removal orders, but Mr. Vatthanavong was not among them.
'The conviction, on its face, looks bad,' Ms. Zaman said. 'In reality, when I explain the circumstances, it changes the narrative a little bit, and the circumstances become more sympathetic, and it raises a lot of difficult questions.'
The governor, it seems, was sympathetic.
Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.