Sae Joon Park, a 55-year-old U.S. Army veteran, built a life for himself in Hawaii.
He came to the U.S. from South Korea at the age of 7, where his family put down roots in Los Angeles. After high school, as he looked for direction in his life, Park looked to the Army. He enlisted as an infantryman at the age of 19.
He received a Purple Heart after being seriously wounded during combat in Panama and left the Army with an honorable discharge. But as he navigated his return to civilian life he struggled with severe post-traumatic stress.
He turned to drugs to dull the pain, but it pulled him deeper into the abyss as he struggled with addiction. He ultimately spent three years in prison in New York after pleading guilty to attempting to buy crack cocaine and jumping bail.
When he was released from prison, immigration officials issued Park a removal order, but they allowed him to stay in the country as long as he attended regular check-ins with federal agents. His military service and later good behavior in prison made him a low priority for deportation.
He’s been clean ever since. Over the last decade, he raised his now-grown children in Hawaii and until this summer had been working at Aloha Kia.
Though he is a South Korean national on paper, Park said that since he was a kid growing up in L.A., he has thought of America as his country — and over the years has only become more patriotic. But under the federal immigration crackdown, Park received orders to leave the country.
In June, he boarded a plane from Honolulu to South Korea — a country he hasn’t been to in decades and that he says feels foreign to him.
He’s hoping to return to Hawaii. With his lawyer, Danicole Ramos, Park is appealing to the Queens County District Attorney’s Office in New York to revisit the convictions that led to his deportation and see if they can be retroactively reduced. They have sent the office a letter and are circulating an online petition on Change.org.
Ramos said “that allows us an opportunity to reopen his removal case in the New York Immigration Court — they keep the removal order — and it gives him some kind of a pathway, hopefully, for him to come back to the United States.”
Ramos said the drug charges under current law are no longer considered a deportable offense and are a relatively minor concern, but the bail-jumping charge was a felony. He hopes to have that charge reduced to a misdemeanor or dropped.
“Usually, aggravated felonies would be considered like sexual assault, robbery, using a weapon to threaten someone, murder, dealing drugs, selling drugs — that’s an aggravated felony,” said Ramos. “Given that, bail-jumping doesn’t seem that serious, right? But in immigration law, the bail-jumping is considered an aggravated felony, so that, in itself, is what caused his removal order to be serious and not give him a form of relief.”
Deportation debate
In order for Park to make his case, the federal government would have to grant him humanitarian parole to return to New York to address the charges.
The Department of Homeland Security has stood by his removal, citing his “extensive criminal history,” which also includes a misdemeanor conviction for illegal firearm possession when he was living in L.A. before his Army service, and a misdemeanor assault stemming from a fight in Hawaii while he was still addicted to crack.
The DHS said in a statement that “President (Donald) Trump and Secretary (Kristi) Noem have been clear: criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S. If you come to our country and break our laws, we will find you, arrest you, and deport you. That’s a promise.”
Immigrants have a long history of service in the U.S. military. At times, the Pentagon has actively looked for immigrants who speak languages and have cultural knowledge that commanders have wanted to support certain missions. The military even sends recruiters to Pacific island countries looking for candidates, and the Navy used to actively recruit Filipino nationals.
Today, as much as 5% of people serving in the military are noncitizens. Ramos noted that in the 2020 fiscal year, 38% of new-citizen naturalizations were U.S. military veterans. But he also argued many immigrant veterans aren’t properly informed about how to become naturalized during or after their service.
It’s unclear how many veterans have been deported after their service. Lawmakers have been debating the issue since well before even Trump’s first presidency.
After deportation, honorably discharged veterans are still entitled to benefits they earned, and the Department of Veterans Affairs offers services through a humanitarian parole program and the VA Foreign Medical Program. But a 2024 study by the University of California-Berkeley School of Law found that deported veterans face severe obstacles to accessing both.
The government is supposed to keep records whenever a U.S. military veteran is deported. But Ramos said, “They haven’t been good at keeping track of that data. So there’s no real data on how many vets have been deported, or a list of deportation. So Sae is the statistic, but we don’t know how many there are that have been in a similar situation.”
PTSD struggles
Soon after Park finished his military training, he was stationed at Fort Clayton in October 1989 in what was then the Panama Canal Zone. Tensions were already ramping up and war seemed imminent. By December war broke out. Park was only into his second day of active combat when a Panamanian soldier shot him in the back, seriously wounding him.
A fellow soldier, a medic, dragged him to safety through the gunfire. As bullets flew all around them and the medic tried to save Park, an American civilian that worked in the Panama Canal, a Vietnam veteran, ultimately rushed to the rescue.
“He saw what was going on, the ambulance couldn’t get up there because there’s too much firefighting going on,” Park recalled. “So he went home and got his pickup truck and put me in the back of his pickup truck and got me to the hospital. Two or three minutes later, I would have died from loss of blood.”
Park was sent to San Antonio, Texas, for additional treatment, where President George H.W. Bush visited wounded troops at the hospital. Park recalled well wishes from people in the city, saying, “They were patriotic, like everyone’s coming up to me, giving me gifts, visiting me at the hospital. So that was an experience that I’ll never forget. I’m very honored by that.”
But after leaving the Army, loud noises put him on edge and he had nightmares every night. He started self-medicating with drugs. Things got even worse during the 1992 L.A. riots — his family’s business was among those targeted and burned to the ground.
“My cousin was living in Hawaii, so she recommended come to Hawaii — it’s nice, safe, like mostly Asian population, and it’s really nice there,” said Park. “So we made a big decision, my mom, my aunts and uncles — three families — we all moved to Hawaii. Hawaii was great, but unfortunately, I had an addiction.”
He got married and had two children in Hawaii, but his addiction led to the marriage collapsing. Park said, “I would love to erase those memories from those years, because it wasn’t fair to my family, my kids. It’s just totally wrong.”
Park went to New York to live with his cousin after separating from his wife, and he was ultimately arrested there.
After he jumped bail, he returned to Hawaii but was caught and extradited back to New York. “When you hit rock bottom, that’s when you can quit everything,” Park said. “It was so easy. They had drugs in prison. They had drugs in jail. Never once did I want to pick anything up, knowing that I just lost everything, including my family and, like, being away from my children.”
Rebuilding again
He returned to Hawaii and dedicated his life to making up for lost time with his children. Over that time, he’s seen his children grow up, graduate college and begin building lives of their own. Every year, he reapplied for a work permit that cost $1,000 and checked in regularly with immigration services.
But this year when he checked in, Park said, “they were ready to put handcuffs on me and detain me; that was really scary. Somehow, some way, thanks to my lawyer Danicole and my family being there — I heard I was the only one — they actually didn’t detain me. They put an ankle bracelet on me and gave me the option to deport myself within the next three weeks.”
His children, along with other ohana, were there when he went to the airport for his flight to Korea.
Park said he’s been lucky compared to others in his shoes. He still has ties to extended family in Korea, on his father’s side — even though he hasn’t seen them in years — and has a roof over his head. He speaks the language but said he can’t read or write it, making it incredibly difficult for him to find employment.
Source: The Garden Island
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