Governor Jerry Brown, has pardoned two Cambodian immigrant refugees living in Northern Carolina. They had been on a pathway towards deportation from the US, as a result of criminal convictions many years ago, placing them in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s more aggressive immigration enforcement policy.
Brown’s announcement that he was pardoning Rottanak Kong, from Davis, and Mony Neth, from Modesto, came on Saturday. The Governor said that both men had long since paid for their crimes and were now living upright and honest lives. Although immigration is the responsibility of the federal, rather than state government, the men’s attorneys hope that the pardons will remove the rationale for their deportation.
Across the US, many other immigration attorneys are also hoping to gain such pardons for their clients, in final bids to either prevent them from being deported or even allow them to be allowed to return to the country. President Barack Obama made the targeting of convicted criminal immigrants a priority for his administration, but the Trump administration has cast a considerably wider net on the seriousness of the crimes required to be the focus of such attention.
Federal officials began to act quickly following the new President’s signing of an executive order, which directed the Department of Homeland Security to make deporting undocumented immigrants in the US a priority, as well as for the removal of those charged with, but not yet convicted, of crimes.