The deportees

Exiled: From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to California and Back
Katya Cengel
Potomac Books: 2018
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On the way to Phnom Penh International Airport, we hit the usual Friday night traffic. Luka Meas’s tuk-tuk headed west through the capital, gliding down a main thoroughfare until it inevitably got wedged between SUVs, motorbikes and other tuk-tuks.

It was mid-December, and I was heading home to the United States to spend time with my family over Christmas. Luka has not seen his family for seven years. He was born in Phnom Penh in 1968 and immigrated with his family to New York City when he was about thirteen years old. He grew up in the Bronx in the 1980s, when crack cocaine was decimating poor communities in the borough. In 2004, he started using and selling crack.

“Eventually it got me into county jails,” he said, in his thick Bronx accent. “I went to rehab … relapse, rehab, relapse.”

After another arrest, he served a three-year prison sentence. He was deported to Cambodia by the US government immediately after his release in 2011.

“I just happened to touch drugs,” Luka told me a year ago. “I didn’t kill nobody, nothing. But now it’s, like, if you are a non-citizen and you have one felony, you go.”

He added, “I think that’s a little bit unfair.”

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