Tuan Van Bui’s bad luck arguably started the day he was born in 1970 in the city then known as Saigon — the child of a Vietnamese woman and one of the thousands of U.S. soldiers who fought in Southeast Asia for nearly two decades.
Van Bui never knew his dad, but he quickly learned what it was like to grow up in a hostile homeland that called the estimated 25,000 to 50,000 Amerasian kids like him “children of the dust.” The communist government that won the war in 1975 denied him any education past grade school.
In 1990, Van Bui caught a break — of sorts. In the late 1980s, a U.S. Congress struggling to come to grips with the mess America had left behind passed the Amerasian Homecoming Act. That allowed Van Bui to legally immigrate to America and settle in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, but with no real safety net.
His first two decades on U.S. soil were rough, marked by occasional run-ins with the law. But in middle age, Van Bui had settled into a more comfortable American life. He married a fellow Amerasian immigrant in 2017, earned some money from construction and other odd jobs, and indulged his quirky hobbies like stamp collecting. He was paying back his fines from the bad years and — although threatened with a removal order — he religiously showed up for check-ins with U.S. immigration officials.
His family says Van Bui was doing everything the right way.
Still, it was with much trepidation that Van Bui showed up with his wife at the Philadelphia immigration office on Aug. 18, as the reelected Donald Trump and his team pushed for a massive increase in arrests and deportations. What happened next, as his wife related to family members, was even worse than they had feared.
Van Bui’s stepdaughter, Ly Wang, told me this week that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were waiting. “Before he could even really check in, they saw him, they spotted him,” she said. “The ICE agents ambushed him, and they shoved my mom out of the way. They tackled my stepdad … shoving him into a wall because he’s a big dude.” Wang said the ICE agents threw Van Bui’s paperwork in the trash and warned her mom, “You need to leave before we make it a problem for you, too.”
Van Bui’s arrest that August day was the start of a seven and a half month Kafkaesque journey through the rancid food and 4 a.m. wake-ups of ICE detention sites, first in upstate Pennsylvania, and then nearly 700 miles away in rural Indiana.
It ended on April 1. That morning, Van Bui had made his usual phone call to his wife and, despite the routine complaints, sounded fine. The next call came that night, but from the chaplain at Indiana’s Miami Correctional Facility. Van Bui had suddenly collapsed and died. He was just 55.
It took more than two months for Wang and her mom — who herself had suffered a debilitating stroke in the days right after watching Van Bui’s violent arrest — to deal with Indiana authorities, obtain some additional testing, bring his body back home, and secure a spot for him in the Fernwood Cemetery in suburban Lansdowne, where he was buried on June 5.
But his family’s many questions have not been laid to rest.
Why was Van Bui’s ICE detention dragged out for so many months when — given the wretchedness of life behind barbed wire — he and his family would have preferred deportation to Vietnam, even if he hadn’t been there for 36 years? Why wasn’t Van Bui given more medical attention, as doctors noted his swollen knees and other signs of worsening health? And why is ICE’s account of Van Bui’s death so different from what other detainees told the family — that staff did nothing at first while they, the detainees, attempted CPR until paramedics finally arrived a full hour after the collapse, too late to do anything but declare him dead?
And a bigger question hangs over all of this: Why did a redemption-seeking United States government invite Van Bui to come here from the other side of the world, only to leave him to fend for himself before brutally arresting him, dumping him in a hellhole prison, and allegedly watching him die from chronic and then acute neglect?
“I think he fully considered America to be his home, and he was very comfortable here despite even all the challenges against [Amerasians],” Wang said. What happened to Tuan Van Bui is in many ways mystifying, but he is also not unique.
Even as the Trump regime’s deportation raids have sometimes dominated the headlines, much of the attention has focused on the targeting by masked ICE and Border Patrol agents of brown and Black neighborhoods, such as Latinos in Los Angeles and Chicago or the Somali community in Minneapolis. The government’s stepped-up arrests of Asian Americans have largely flown under the radar.
“There’s just a severe sense of fear in the community,” Nancy Nguyen, the executive director of Philadelphia-based VietLead, told me, adding that the message “for the Asian communities is that they are not wanted here under Trump.”
A painful irony is that the hardest hit have been refugees for whom the United States opened its doors in the latter years of the 20th century — a belated acknowledgment that their plight was often the result of America’s violent and unpopular war in Southeast Asia. This winter in Minnesota, masked immigration raiders frequently targeted the Hmong people from Laos who’d once been welcomed for their role in helping American troops and the CIA over there.
Nguyen said that nationally, more than 1,000 Vietnamese immigrants and more than 500 Laotians were deported in 2025 — compared with fewer than 100 a year before the second coming of Trump. A few have been sent to remote African nations like Eswatini, where they don’t know any people or the language. Many more have been languishing, as Van Bui did, in the cruel limbo of ICE detention — sometimes with lethal consequences. Nguyen said that of the 50 or so ICE detainees who’ve died under the Trump regime, nearly a third were of Asian descent.
Van Bui was actually the second Asian American to die at the Miami Correctional Facility — run by the state of Indiana, which contracts with ICE — since February. Lorth Sim, 59, who came to America in 1983 as a refugee from the brutal dictatorship of Cambodia’s Pol Pot, also collapsed at the facility, where officials also blamed heart disease.
What’s more, Van Bui is the third member of Pennsylvania’s Asian community to die in immigration custody in less than a year. In January, 46-year-old Cambodian American Parady La was arrested outside his Upper Darby home and died three days later at Philadelphia’s federal detention center, reportedly while undergoing narcotics withdrawal. Last August, 32-year-old Chinese immigrant Chaofeng Ge died at the upstate Moshannon Valley Processing Center five days after his arrest near Harrisburg; family members and advocates have challenged ICE’s assertion that his death was a suicide by hanging.
In Van Bui’s case, ICE issued a fairly detailed statement that insisted the Amerasian detainee — who’d suffered a serious stroke on Christmas Eve 2023 and used a cane for mobility, among other preexisting health problems — was properly monitored and treated amid clear signs his condition was deteriorating, with a decreased platelet count and then swollen knees indicating “obstructive pulmonary disease.” It also claimed — disputed in the accounts other detainees have offered Van Bui’s family — that staff at the Indiana facility responded quickly to his April 1 collapse with CPR and a defibrillator before he was pronounced dead at 6 p.m.
Whether ICE and Indiana corrections officers offered Van Bui adequate medical care is still up for debate, but what the government definitely did not offer was empathy. As with other ICE custody deaths, grieving relatives were slammed with an official press release that denied Van Bui’s humanity.
“Criminal illegal alien from Vietnam passes away at Miami Correctional Center” was the headline on ICE’s press release, which stressed Van Bui’s encounters with law enforcement when he was a younger man.
His stepdaughter Wang told me the litany of criminal charges in the release includes some arrests for which he was not charged or convicted, and that he was diligently repaying fines for other past violations. But what hurts more is the regime’s cruel characterization of a human being whom Wang described as a soft-spoken, gentle giant who never turned down a request for help from his Kensington neighbors and — “a nerd in a way” — loved to scour flea markets for cuckoo clocks or rare coins or stamps.
She said he’d told her little about the first 20 years of his life in Saigon (renamed Ho Chi Minh City after the war), but did admit that the abandonment of his American GI father weighed on him.
“Something that he did tell me and just confided in me was that he never felt like he grew up feeling wanted, you know? Starting with his dad not being around, and his mother being very busy and being a single parent,” she said. “So he had kind of a rough start.”
Amerasian kids were treated cruelly in Vietnam — as reminders of the hated Americans who’d invaded their country — and typically denied any education beyond grade school, which apparently was the case for Van Bui. The United States seemed to acknowledge that harsh reality when Congress and the Reagan administration enacted the special AM-1 visa that allowed Van Bui to come here in 1990. But the new arrivals didn’t always adapt easily to a home where they were reminders of a war that most Americans wanted to forget as much as the Vietnamese.
“My impression that he got into kind of the wrong mix of crowds,” said Wang, who first met her future stepfather when she was a teenager. “I see him as someone who, because he didn’t have that much of an education … that you could manipulate, unfortunately.”
Like many others, Van Bui faced an immigration judge’s removal order from the 2000s because of his legal problems, yet was allowed to remain as long as he continued his regular check-ins — which he did until his violent arrest last August.
Van Bui was initially sent to the large Moshannon Valley site in Clearfield County, Pa., then transferred in December hundreds of miles west to the lockup in tiny Bunker Hill, Ind., where, since last year, ICE has promised the state of Indiana $291 a day — four times the normal rate — to house some of its rising numbers of detainees.
In just a short period of time, complaints from detainees, advocates, and Indiana Democratic Rep. André Carson — who visited the site just days after Van Bui died — that conditions at Miami Correctional Facility are cruel and inhumane have mounted. Carson said two detainees he met described “heartbreaking” conditions, and that a lack of functioning intercoms may have played a role in Van Bui’s death. The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana settled multiple suits from state inmates — predating the 2025 deal with ICE — alleging pitch-black conditions from windows covered with steel plates, and frequent episodes of cells flooded with wastewater.
Wang said it took weeks to even learn Van Bui had been moved to Indiana, and when they did reconnect, he complained of freezing-cold winter conditions and horrible food, even as they were awakened by guards for breakfast at 4 a.m. Things were so bad that Van Bui actually wanted to be deported back to Vietnam, but despite finally seeing a judge in February, the government continued to hold him in these gulag-like conditions.
Until he died.
During the agonizing weeks Van Bui’s wife and stepdaughter worked to bring home his remains — an effort which included this still active GoFundMe page — they heard from other detainees, most of them also Asian Americans. One Vietnamese native from Philadelphia who successfully won his release in a habeas corpus case tracked down Van Bui’s wife for a surprise visit, to tell the family his version of what really happened on April 1.
“What we’ve heard from the cellmates is that he collapsed, and they immediately called for help, and no one came,” Wang recounted. “So the cellmates themselves, they did the CPR. None of the staff did CPR. The cellmates did the CPR. They … did CPR and chest compressions relentlessly, with somebody else pressed up against the gate of the jail cell just yelling, ‘Help! Help!’”
They allege there was no help, not right away.
“From their view, what they saw was the correction officer sitting there staring at the video and not moving at all,” Wang continued. “It’s reported that [the corrections officers] waited at least around 15 to 20 minutes before they got up, locked down all the cells, and then finally went over to see what happened. Once they came over, they bought a defibrillator, except they did not know how to use it, so they had to call the paramedics. By the time the paramedics showed up, they declared him dead, which was about an hour later than he actually collapsed.”
I asked a spokesperson for the Indiana Department of Correction about what really happened on April 1, but was referred to ICE. And ICE, as with past columns, has not responded to my request for more information. All we have is ICE’s official report, which insists that detention center staff were the ones who performed CPR, that the defibrillator was used — and which offers no timeline for how long it really took for the paramedics to arrive.
Those explanations aren’t satisfactory to Van Bui’s family, or to immigration advocates here in Philadelphia or the ACLU back in Indiana, who continue to press for answers while they explore possible legal action.
But there are questions that are bigger than any courtroom. Why are Asian communities that, in those post-Vietnam War years, drove the comeback of America’s cities and older suburbs now targeted by a terror campaign from the U.S. government? Why did the United States abuse innocent people from Southeast Asia — and especially the Amerasians — twice, first in a pointless war and now in a gulag archipelago on American soil?
What did Tuan Van Bui do to deserve neglect and death in a dark, dank cell hundreds of miles from the people who loved him?
When his family finally held his services at a Chinatown funeral home, it wasn’t known if his wife would be healthy enough to attend. She did show up briefly at his wake, just long enough to utter these anguished words that Ly Wang posted on their GoFundMe page.
“You said you would come home! Why didn’t you come home?”
