SEATTLE: An immigration judge in Washington state declined to release an Iraq War veteran from custody Wednesday while he fights the government’s efforts to deport him.
Chong Kim, a South Korean immigrant and green card holder from Portland, Oregon, struggled with drug addiction, homelessness and post-traumatic stress following his time in Iraq in 2009 and 2010, leading to convictions for burglary and other charges.
Kim’s lawyer and friends have said he has done well since completing a substance abuse treatment program run by the Department of Veterans Affairs early this year.
But immigration agents arrested him in April and brought him to a detention center in Tacoma, Washington. They plan to deport him because of his convictions.
“It’s just wrong to be deporting an Army veteran,” said Matt Luce, 41, of Troutdale, Oregon, who attended high school with Kim and traveled with three other former classmates to the hearing Wednesday. “Despite his convictions, he was on and continues to be on the right path. This is just a travesty of justice.”
Kim’s attorney, Tim Warden-Hertz of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, said that Immigration Judge Theresa Scala found that the government met its burden to show that Kim posed a danger to the public or a risk of flight, though he said she did not explain her rationale in court.
Warden-Hertz planned to appeal the decision, which he said illustrates the difficulty of obtaining bond in the immigration detention system.
US Customs and Immigration Enforcement did not immediately respond to an e-mailed request for comment Wednesday.
In an earlier statement, the agency said Kim had been arrested after “it was determined he has a prior felony conviction in Multnomah County for attempt to commit arson in the first degree, among other charges.”
Kim joined the National Guard in 2005 and served in Iraq in 2009 and 2010 before being honorably discharged. He came to the US more than 35 years ago, at age 5, and he became a legal permanent resident in 1981. He does not speak Korean, his friends have said.
His immigration troubles stem primarily from two incidents — a burglary and another case, which his lawyer described as a “dumb prank,” in which he filled a beer bottle with gasoline, lit it on fire and threw it at a concrete outer wall at the back of a hardware store.
After the first matter, in 2013, he faced deportation. The judge let him go — but warned him not to get in trouble again, former Staff Sgt. Ryan Kell, who was Kim’s team leader in Iraq, told the Associated Press in July.
Last year, though, he was convicted of attempted arson in a special veterans court following the second incident. He participated in a 4½-month, inpatient substance abuse treatment program run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, and had been doing well.
“He admits he had a drug problem and that he committed crimes when he was under the influence — he’s not proud of it,” Warden-Hertz said. “To find he’s a danger or a flight risk now doesn’t make any sense.”
In petitioning for Kim’s release pending deportation proceedings, Warden-Hertz submitted letters from a clinical psychologist who detailed Kim’s success in the substance abuse program as well as from a clinical nurse manager at the Portland VA Health Care System, where Kim began working in January as a housekeeper at a cardiology and oncology unit.
“Mr. Kim demonstrated exceptional team work,” the nurse manager, Cynthia Fahy, wrote. “It was regularly reported to this manager that he often went out of his way to assist other housekeepers and nurses.”
Jason Phebus, 31, of Gresham, Oregon, is an Air Force veteran who began drinking heavily — and later using harder drugs — as he had a difficult time transitioning into civilian life. He said Wednesday that he met Chong in the VA’s substance abuse program, and he credited Chong’s friendship and advice with helping him make it to where Phebus is today — in recovery with a steady job.
His response to the notion that Chong might be deported is “a string of explicits,” he said.
“He was man enough to stand up and serve this country, in combat no less,” Phebus said. “Now he’s not fit to be here?“
Judge won’t release Iraq War veteran fighting deportation
Judge won’t release Iraq War veteran fighting deportation
Documentary highlights Israeli brutality
- ‘American Doctor’ shows bravery of men voluntarily going to work in hospitals repeatedly hit by Israeli army
- Despite a fragile ceasefire in place since October last year, there has been continued violence between Israeli forces and Hamas, which has seen Palestinian non-combatants killed, including dozens of children
PARK CITY, US: At the start of “American Doctor,” a new documentary about US medics working in hospitals in the Gaza Strip during the Israel-Hamas war, director Poh Si Teng initially declines to film pictures of dead Palestinian children that one of the doctors is trying to show her.
Teng worries that she will have to pixelate the gruesome scene to protect the dignity of the children.
“You’re not dignifying them unless you let their memory, their bodies, tell the story of this trauma, of this genocide. You’re not doing them a service by not showing them,” Jewish-American doctor Mark Perlmutter tells her.
“This is what my tax dollars did. That’s what your tax dollars did. That’s what my neighbor’s tax dollars did. They have the right to know the truth.
“You have the responsibility, as I do, to tell the truth.
You pixelate this, that’s journalistic malpractice.”
Teng’s unflinching film follows Perlmutter and two other American doctors — one Palestinian American and the other a non-practicing
Zoroastrian — as they try to treat the results of the unspeakable brutality visited on a largely civilian population in Gaza since Israel launched its retaliation for Hamas’s October 2023 attack.
Alongside the severed limbs and the open wounds, the doctors labor on with their Palestinian colleagues, we also see the trio’s attempts at advocacy — in Washington’s corridors of power and in Israeli and American media.
The documentary also depicts the practical difficulties they face — the surgical scrubs and antibiotics they have to smuggle across the border to get around the Israeli blockade, and the last-minute refusals of Israeli authorities to let them in.
And we see the bravery of men voluntarily going to work in hospitals that are repeatedly hit by the Israeli army.
Israel rejects accusations its numerous strikes against Gaza hospitals amount to war crimes, saying it is targeting “terrorists” in these facilities and claims Hamas operatives are holed up in tunnels underneath the hospitals.
The attacks include the so-called “double tap” strike on the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in the south of the Strip, in August 2025 where the three men have worked.
Emergency responders and journalists who had rushed to the scene after a first projectile hit were killed when a second was fired at the same spot.
Feroze Sidwha, perhaps the most eloquent of the three doctors, repeatedly makes the case throughout the film that he has never seen any tunnels and that, in any case, even the presence of wounded fighters in a hospital does not make it a legitimate target.
“Americans deserve the opportunity to know what’s going on, what their money is being used for, and you know, just to decide. ‘Do you really want this being done?’,” he said at the Sundance Film Festival, where the film got its premiere on Friday.
“I’m pretty sure the answer is ‘no’. I just want to keep speaking out and letting people know they don’t have to be an accessory to child murder. But we all are, right now.”
The film is dedicated to the around 1,700 healthcare workers who have been killed since Israel launched its invasion in October 2023.
UN investigators have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, a charge that Israel has denied as “distorted and false,” while accusing the authors of antisemitism.
Despite a fragile ceasefire in place since October last year, there has been continued violence between Israeli forces and Hamas, which has seen Palestinian non-combatants killed, including dozens of children, according to UNICEF.
Reporters Without Borders says nearly 220 journalists have died since the start of the war, making Israel the biggest killer of journalists worldwide for three years running.
The Sundance Film Festival runs until Feb. 1.
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