Mai Nguyen isn’t a farmer and is quick to point that out.
“This is not my thing,” she said.
Her husband, Van Vu, is the one who takes care of the roughly 150,000 chickens that normally inhabit the eight-building poultry operation the couple owns in Mayes County, Okla.
“He’s always wanted to own a farm.”
Vu tasks himself with just about everything around the 80-acre plot of land the couple bought years ago.
“He walks the chickens. He maintains everything. He makes sure they’re fed, they have water, the deads are picked up, and everything that breaks down, he fixes,” Nguyen said. “It’s a ton of work and not a lot of people can handle it.”
Vu drives their three children to school and back every weekday, working the farm in between and often late into the night, setting traps to defend the chickens from feral hogs that wreak havoc on poultry herds.
The farm provides the majority of the family’s income, allowing Nguyen to work a standard 40-hour-per-week remote job that she enjoys.
“Van’s really good with his hands,” Nguyen said. “He’s a really good handyman.”
For Nguyen and Vu, this was the American dream.
Both are refugees from Vietnam. Vu arrived in the U.S. in 1981 at the age of four. He and his four siblings fled the country still reeling from the devastation of the Vietnam War. Their parents would not make it to the U.S. with them until many years later.
“We have this trauma growing up,” Nguyen said, “and we made something else of ourselves.”
That dream, however, was abruptly halted when Vu was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during a routine check-in this year.
Vu is one of thousands of Southeast Asian refugees who are either detained by or in legal limbo with immigration authorities for minor offenses they committed years ago, even after laying roots in the U.S. with no further issues. Before President Donald Trump took office, the U.S. immigration system left many of these refugees unsure yet hopeful for a better future. Trump’s return has accelerated the pace of deportations to those who have little to no criminal record despite the president’s repeated claims of deporting the “worst of the worst.”
Overcoming an upbringing of trauma
Nguyen said the experience of refugee status was hard on both of them, but especially difficult for Vu.
“He doesn’t have any parental guidance,” she said. “Everybody’s just trying to survive.”
Vu and his siblings were moved around from Nebraska to New Mexico several times. His older brother was eventually able to secure a job and an apartment for them in New Mexico after turning 18.
Vu eventually moved to Oklahoma to attend Tulsa’s Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology.
“He loved flying, really, really loved flying,” Nguyen said, “but flying costs money. When he ran out of money, I guess, that’s when it all went wrong.”
In 2001, Vu was arrested in Tulsa for driving under the influence. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor DUI and had his license suspended.
Not having any family in the area and needing to get around, he decided to make his own license, which he was caught with after being pulled over again. Charged with a felony, Vu’s lawyer recommended he take a plea deal. Vu accepted and was sentenced to two years, much of which he spent out of prison.
But Vu wasn’t told that pleading guilty to a felony would put his green card status in jeopardy.
“Because of that, he was put on a deportation order,” Nguyen said.
Vu was detained by ICE in 2002. Nguyen said ICE pushed hard for Vu’s deportation, but Vietnam wouldn’t accept him or any refugees like him. Based on a memorandum of understanding from 2008, Vietnam had a policy of refusing refugees that came to the U.S. before 1995, when relations between the two countries were re-established.
Left in legal limbo despite rehabilitation
Vu was at odds with an agency that wanted to but couldn’t deport him. He was instead required to check in with ICE every year.
“Since then, he’s a normal person,” Nguyen said. “He’s been paying taxes, he just works for his family.”
Vu visited ICE offices annually while making efforts to turn his life around. He moved back to New Mexico with his family. His parents had joined their children in the U.S. by then. He met Nguyen in 2006.
Worried that his felony conviction would crater any attempt to get a full-time position, Vu decided to take up work as a poultry farmer, a profession not unfamiliar with his family. Nguyen’s parents owned an egg farm in Alabama where Vu would regularly help out. Vu’s older brother owns his own poultry operation in Texas.
The couple looked to northeast Oklahoma for farmland to purchase.
“This was the perfect place for us because Tulsa is an hour away,” Nguyen said.
The family moved to the farm at the end of 2017. Nguyen made efforts to have Vu’s old conviction reversed.
Years went by and Vu checked in with immigration authorities without issue.
On the morning of Feb. 25, Vu went to check in with ICE again at the agency’s office in Tulsa.
“He was texting me about houses,” Nguyen said.
At around 10:30, the texts stopped. Vu called Nguyen at 11.
“He was like, ‘hey, I’m not coming home, they’re detaining me.’ And I was like, ‘you’re kidding me.’ I thought he was joking.”
Nguyen said she began having a panic attack.
“I just couldn’t breathe.”
Nguyen texted her parents asking for them to come to Oklahoma right away.
“I remember driving to pick up my kids from school and I couldn’t see,” Nguyen said. “I couldn’t see. I couldn’t move my face and I couldn’t move my hands, so I had to pull over.”
Nguyen learned that Vu was taken to Cimarron Correctional Facility in Payne County, near Cushing, where he has remained in detention ever since.
“I cry all the time,” Nguyen said. “It’s been really hard for me to just speak about Van.”
Nguyen said Vu’s detention has also taken a psychological toll on their children.
“I think they’re traumatized right now,” she said. “Like, ‘where is our dad? Where is our dad?’”
Beyond the emotional damage to her family, Nguyen said without Vu, logistics and finances have been major struggles. Nguyen said it’s been difficult to hire anyone who will work on the farm. She’s put the entire plot up for sale and sold all the remaining chickens before they died. Nguyen has stopped contributing to her retirement account in order to save money to pay for legal fees and commissary for Vu.
Vu is also not allowed his high cholesterol medication while in detention. Communication is possible, but sporadic. Nguyen must wait for Vu to call her and they can only speak for a set time.
Nguyen has sought attorneys to help, but all have informed her that there is virtually no pathway to get Vu released. One attorney has helped Nguyen file a writ of habeas corpus. Nguyen has tried reaching out to Gov. Kevin Stitt to seek a pardon for Vu’s conviction, but to no avail.
Thousands of Southeast Asian immigrants face similar fates
Deportation over non-violent crimes committed by immigrants from countries like Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos is nothing new.
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRAIRA), signed by President Bill Clinton, mandated deportations for any non-citizen deemed to have committed an “aggravated felony” while expanding the definition of such a crime.
The Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC) estimates there are around 15,000 immigrants from these countries facing deportation because of that law.
“This is something that we’ve tracked for the last 30 years,” said SEARAC Executive Director Quyen Dinh.
“The patterns that we see in terms of the types of crimes are what we describe as crimes of poverty and youth.”
The difference now, Dinh said, is the Trump administration’s rapid acceleration of deportation orders and the more brazen tactics taken by ICE officers.
“The scale is absolutely exponential,” Dinh said.
Immigrants in Oklahoma are feeling the heat. Holly Forster-Nguyen is a friend of Van Vu and Mai Nguyen. Her husband was also detained by ICE in March. “I didn’t know that this was going on for this many other people,” said Forster-Nguyen.
Like Vu, Hai Nguyen also came to the U.S. from Vietnam when he was a child. His family resettled in Tulsa in 1993.
The couple met while they were students at East Central High School and have been together ever since.
Hai Nguyen has been in a similar legal limbo following a 2006 marijuana conviction that was expunged from his record. Forster-Nguyen said, like Vu, her husband was not told a felony conviction could end up putting him on the deportation list. Hai Nguyen was detained by ICE during a mandated routine check-in and was taken to Cimarron Correctional Facility where he’s been ever since.
“Options have felt really limited for a very long time,” said Forster-Nguyen, who has also so far exhausted legal avenues to free her husband.
Both families said attorneys advising the initial convictions did not tell their clients of the risk to their green card statuses. Dinh said that’s a common pattern.
“This happened at a time when we want to give attorneys the benefit of the doubt that they also didn’t understand that these would be the ramification,” Dinh said.
“We’ve also seen a trend, though, that there are attorneys who don’t understand the intersection between criminal justice policies and immigration policies.”
Vu and Nguyen's circumstantial protection from deportation has since vanished. Vietnam and the U.S. under Trump renegotiated their 2008 MOU to push for more deportations.
Dinh said that, in 2025, nearly 700 people who fled Vietnam for the U.S. before 1995 have since been deported.
“It’s tearing families apart,” Dinh said. “It’s devastating.”
Dinh said the majority of the deportation cases SEARAC sees are of immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.
Van Vu and Hai Nguyen were raised to know the U.S. as their only home, having little to no tangible connection to their birth country.
“He just grew up like a kid here, like anyone else,” said Forster-Nguyen of her husband.
“I thought we are Americans,” Mai Nguyen said. “Recent events have made me question my whole entire life.”
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Mai Nguyen has set up a website with information about Vu's case.
Holly Forster-Nguyen has set up a crowdfunding page to help pay for legal expenses.
