US Immigration Raids Spark Statelessness Crisis in Mekong Countries

Pheap Rom in Phnom Penh on July 25, 2026 | Len Leng/Mekong Independent/Creative Commons

In an article published by NYSEAN Partner Mekong Independent, Danielle Keeton-Olsen writes about the plight of refugees and undocumented immigrants who have been deported to the Mekong region during the current Trump administr.

For a time after arriving in Cambodia, Pheap Rom spent his days on his friend’s porch, watching cars and motorbikes pass through Phnom Penh’s Toul Tompoung 1 neighborhood.

The friend that he stayed with was exasperated, Pheap Rom said, telling him to go outside, explore the capital, get lost in the city. When he asked why Pheap Rom wouldn’t move, he said he was afraid.

“It’s in my head bro,” Pheap Rom said he had explained to his friend back in late March. “When you’re so traumatized and institutionalized, your mentality, it’s like you want to go, but you’ve been bashed and bashed and bashed and bashed for so long that it’s embedded in my mind, in my instincts.

“I wanna go, but I can’t.”

Phnom Penh is the first city where Pheap Rom, 43, could walk as a free man in 17 years. He came to the U.S. as a Cambodian child refugee, went to prison for 15 years only to be detained again by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), before being flown to a high-security prison in Eswatini, in southern Africa.

Now in Phnom Penh, he is looking for new job opportunities, all while trying to unpack nearly two decades of confinement as a result of the U.S.’s frigid treatment of refugees.