Incarcerated Organizers Who Won Their Freedom Now Facing Deportation
One of Borey “Peejay” Ai’s earliest memories is the sound of gunfire. “My mom would put us under the table,” he recalled. Ai was too young to understand what was happening, but he remembered being afraid like his mother. “Because I felt her fear, I felt fear too,” he said.
Ai was born in a refugee camp in Thailand after his mother fled Cambodia to escape the Khmer Rouge genocide. As a small child, he would climb a hill to water a pepper plant he had been growing. From the vantage point, he would look across the border and see people shooting at one another.
Nearly 40 years later, after surviving the brutality of the U.S. prison system, Ai now faces the possibility of deportation back to Cambodia, where he has never set foot. And he’s not the only one.