MONDAY, MAY 2 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE B5
In the months since then, Khoy
has felt gratitude and relief — the
weight of nearly two decades of
judgment and fear lifted.
But she said she has also re-
peatedly found herself thinking
about all the families that did not
have the same resources, whose
loved ones were deported before
they got a chance to fight.
“This,” she said, “is so much
bigger than me.”of her case, Dehghani-Tafti said.
Still, on the December day they
gathered in court in Arlington,
Khoy was so nervous that her legs
felt weak.
When the judge issued his rul-
ing, she looked to Marchand, and
he confirmed that it meant what
she hoped. She said she felt such
relief that she had to restrain
herself from jumping up and
down.read or write the language.
Had Khoy’s case come across
her office’s desk today, it would
have been handled differently,
said Dehghani-Tafti, whose office
supported the judgment reversal
sought by Khoy’s lawyers. The
idea that Khoy could be ripped
out of her life in the United States
and sent to a place to which she
had no connections was “wildly
disproportionate” with the factsdrew George, both lawyers at Bak-
er Botts in Washington, reviewed
Khoy’s case, she had been living in
fear of deportation for more than
16 years.
The white-collar litigators, who
do pro bono wrongful conviction
work, were the most recent in a
succession of lawyers trying to
help. They decided that a narrow,
rarely granted measure with a
Latin name — a petition for coram
vobis — was their only shot. An-
other member of the legal team,
Whitney R. O’Byrne, realized that
Khoy’s first lawyer had given
nearly identical incorrect legal
advice to another client. Newman
— the judge in both cases — had
overturned that client’s convic-
tion in 2006, also in response to a
petition for coram vobis.
They planned to use the an-
cient writ, which allows Virginia
courts to correct clerical or factual
errors not known at the time of
conviction, to argue that because
Khoy was given bad legal advice,
she could not have “knowingly
and voluntarily” understood what
it meant to plead guilty.
“It was our moon shot,” March-
and said. “It was our only shot.”
They were skeptical it would
work, until they had conversa-
tions with Parisa Dehghani-Tafti,
the commonwealth’s attorney for
Arlington County, and assistant
commonwealth’s attorney Paul
Wiley.
On a personal level, Khoy’s sto-
ry resonated with Dehghani-Tafti,
who had immigrated from Iran
with her parents when she was a
child and said she could not imag-
ine the “sheer terror” of being sent
to a country where you cannotFAMILY PHOTO
Linda Khoy, left, with her sister Lundy Khoy outside of their grandparents’ house
in Arlington. Lundy was about 4 years old and Linda was about 3.nity college classes. Her probation
officer became friendly with the
family.
Khoy, then 23, took her college
report card to a meeting in April
2004, excited to show her proba-
tion officer the straight A’s she was
making. When she got to the
meeting, though, she was sur-
rounded by immigration agents.
She remembers them asking her
to stand spread-eagle against a
wall, then placing her in a cell in a
van headed to the Immigration
and Customs Enforcement facili-
ty in Hampton, Va. On the drive,
she prayed and meditated.
“This cannot be happening,”
she remembered thinking, again
and again. It was the first time she
learned that she might face depor-
tation because of her conviction.
Her younger sister Linda Khoy
was at work when she got a call
from the probation officer.
“I’m so sorry,” the woman said.
In detention, Khoy realized
how common her situation was,
having become friendly with a
Bosnian woman in her 20s and an
Israeli mother convicted of drug-
related crimes. Both were deport-
ed.
At home, her mother and sister
worried constantly — for the nine
months she was detained. “Every
day,” Linda Khoy said, “it was like,
okay, are they going to deport
her?”
The years that followed were
filled with fear and disbelief.
Khoy attended ICE check-ins, qui-
etly sought legal advice and grap-
pled with imagining how she
would live in Cambodia, where
she had no close family members
and did not speak the language
fluently.
In 2012, Khoy was abruptly
placed in what she was told was
an “intensive monitoring pro-
gram.” Meetings with ICE were
stepped up. She was fitted with an
ankle bracelet. Deportation felt
imminent.
She decided her best shot at
avoiding it might be speaking out
— which meant for the first time
telling their extended family what
had happened, revealing a long-
held secret.
Khoy was featured in a docu-
mentary. With her sister, she testi-
fied on Capitol Hill. She secured a
pardon in 2016 from then-Vir -
ginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D).The election of Trump — who
launched his campaign vowing to
crack down on immigration,
claiming that Mexico was sending
drugs, criminals and rapists
across the border — was another
turning point. Khoy, at the time a
new mom, decided to share her
story in a New York Times op-ed.
The widely circulated story led to
a fresh round of media attention,
surprising Khoy with how much
her story was now resonating
across the nation with those who
feared what Trump’s presidency
would mean for immigrants.
“I’m not a gang member. I’m
not a drug dealer,” she wrote. “But
I have a criminal record, and I’m
afraid.”‘Our moon shot’
By the time Marchand and An-over?
Misled
While growing up, Khoy was an
interpreter for her parents and a
second mother to her two younger
siblings. Her parents, who had
fled government-sanctioned
genocide in Cambodia, were strict
and protective.
Freshman year at George Ma-
son University brought a taste of
freedom. She met her first boy-
friend and started experimenting
with drugs and alcohol. They
were together after a night out in
May 2000 when a police officer
asked whether Khoy had any
drugs and if they belonged to her.
Not wanting to lie or get her
friends in trouble, she said yes,
and that she planned to sell the
pills to pay her mother back for
money she had taken to purchase
the drugs.
Her lawyer advised her to plead
guilty to possession with intent to
distribute. When she asked him if
it would affect her immigration
status — explaining she was a
green-card holder hoping to apply
for citizenship — he replied that
there was no correlation between
the two.
That was part of a wave of bad
legal advice given to immigrants
in the years following the 1996
laws, said Alison Parker, the man-
aging director of Human Rights
Watch’s United States Program.
The measures, which gained bi-
partisan support in Congress in
the aftermath of the 1993 World
Trade Center bombing and were
signed by President Bill Clinton,
were a response to fears about
crime and terrorism committed
by noncitizens.
Parker said many defense attor-
neys were unaware of the changes
to immigration laws, including
the vast expansion of the list of
crimes that allowed for deporta-
tion.
Between 2007 and 2012, more
than 260,000 noncitizens whose
most serious conviction was for
drug offenses were deported, ac-
cording to Human Rights Watch,
many of them longtime residents
with strong family ties to the
United States.
“Every day since 1996, we de-
port people who are like Lundy,”
said Bill Ong Hing, a professor of
law and migration studies at the
University of San Francisco who
has represented dozens of immi-
grants facing deportation. “Some
stupid five-minute thing in their
life resulted in an aggravated felo-
ny that leads to deportation, with
no consideration of remorse or
rehabilitation.”
Among the Cambodians who
have been deported are a 34-year-
old construction worker caught
urinating in public in Texas and a
22-year-old Marine charged with
manslaughter after driving drunk
in a crash that killed his sister,
Hing said.
Despite a bipartisan commit-
ment in recent years to reforming
harsh drug sentencing laws, Park-
er said little political will has been
concentrated on reforming immi-
gration laws.
“There’s a widespread recogni-
tion that the whole war on drugs
needs to stop,” she said. “But what
is the one group that is left out of
all of those reforms? Immigrants.”
Speaking out
After her conviction, Khoy
moved back in with her mother.
She went to work every day at
5 a.m. at a teleconferencing com-
pany and then attended commu-
KHOY FROM B1
Teen’s drug o≠ense leads to decades o f deportation threats
COURTESY OF LUNDY KHOY
Lundy Khoy, right, and Linda Khoy at Southeast Asia Resource Action Center Advocacy Day in D.C. in June 2016.
The two sisters’ efforts to avert Lundy’s possible deportation to Cambodia included testimony on Capitol Hill.“Every day since 1996,we deport people whoare like Lundy.”
Bill Ong Hing, a professor of law
and migration studies at the
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