Summary: Sae Joon Park, a 56-year-old U.S. Army veteran and Purple Heart recipient from the Panama invasion, was deported to South Korea in 2023 due to a criminal history linked to PTSD and drug addiction. Despite having immigrated to the U.S. as a child and serving in the military, his past legal troubles, including drug and assault charges, resulted in a deportation order. He is now living in South Korea—a country where he is not fluent in the language—and is fighting through media appeals and congressional testimony to be allowed to return to Hawaii.
Main Topics Covered:
1. The deportation of a U.S. combat veteran due to past criminal convictions.
2. The veteran's struggle with PTSD, drug addiction, and reintegration after military service.
3. The legal and personal consequences of immigration policy for non-citizen veterans.
4. The veteran's current life and health challenges in South Korea and his campaign to return to the United States.
Supported by
He Had a Purple Heart, PTSD and a Rap Sheet. He Had to Leave the U.S.
After a long battle with drug addiction, Sae Joon Park felt settled in a new life. But he was deported last year and is now fighting to get back to Hawaii.
Sae Joon Park’s life was in pieces after he was swept up in the Trump administration’s deportation push last year. But on a recent Tuesday, he was preoccupied with the more immediate concern that he might be going deaf.
At a walk-in clinic in Busan, South Korea, he explained to the receptionist, in slightly accented Korean, how his left eardrum had inexplicably ruptured in his sleep a few weeks earlier. Now his right ear seemed to be fading out, too.
“Fill in the blanks, please,” she said, producing an intake form.
“I can’t read or write Korean,” Mr. Park said.
It was a line he had delivered many times in recent weeks, explained by the fact that he hadn’t lived in South Korea since he was 7, when he immigrated to the United States. A U.S. Army veteran with combat trauma and a Purple Heart, he was ordered to leave America at the age of 56 over a criminal history that he thought he had atoned for.
He had pleaded his case in nearly two dozen media interviews. In December, he video-called into a congressional hearing where former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem promised to look into his case.
For the first few months after returning to South Korea, he held off on buying furniture, hoping something might give. Then last month he bought a bed and a table for his new studio apartment. As he considered what it would be like to be deaf on top of it all, a nurse called his name.
“It’s out of my hands now,” he said. “What more could go wrong?”
Four decades ago, the Army promised him a sense of direction.
In the Los Angeles area in the 1980s, “everybody was either in a gang or a victim,” Mr. Park recalled. His mother ran a record shop in Compton, working 365 days a year while occasionally being robbed at gunpoint.
“I knew I didn’t want to do that,” he said.
The possibility of obtaining U.S. citizenship with his service was never on his mind, because he believed the green card he got as a child was just as ironclad, Mr. Park said.
He deployed with the Army to Panama in 1989, a 20-year-old fresh out of basic training among thousands of troops under orders to capture Gen. Manuel Noriega, the dictator facing drug trafficking charges in the U.S.
After a raid on one of Mr. Noriega’s compounds, Mr. Park was eating lunch when he spotted Panamanian soldiers approaching. Just as he turned to warn his sergeant, he crumpled to the ground, unable to feel his legs. What saved him were his dog tags slung over his back, which slowed the bullet that hit his spine.
After being medically discharged as a private, Mr. Park was told by the Department of Veterans Affairs that he was ineligible for disability because he had regained his mobility. He also began to suffer from constant nightmares and anxiety from loud noises.
Although post-traumatic stress disorder was formally recognized by psychiatrists in 1980, it wasn’t until around 2008 that the V.A. reached out to treat him and offer disability payments. But by then, a crack cocaine habit, among other things, had already landed him in compounding legal trouble.
After his mother’s shop burned down in the 1992 L.A. riots, he had begun carrying a gun, which got him arrested during a traffic stop a few years later. Then he was charged with misdemeanor assault after a domestic dispute with his now ex-wife.
An arrest for drug possession in New York in 2007 sent him to prison for two years. After his release, which required him to prove he was sticking to a drug-treatment program, he skipped a court hearing, earning another charge for bail jumping. After fleeing to Hawaii, he finally turned himself in to U.S. marshals. Serving another two years in prison helped him kick his drug habit, he said, but a year before his release in 2011, a judge ordered him to be deported.
He was ultimately allowed to remain in the United States as long as he stayed out of trouble and regularly checked in with immigration authorities.
For the last 15 years, he said he did just that in Hawaii, working as a car dealer, taking care of his mother — who developed dementia — and watching his children become adults with successful careers.
“But everything got taken away from me, just like that,” he said.
In a statement last month, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, declined to confirm whether Ms. Noem had reviewed Mr. Park’s case. “If you come to our country and break our laws, we will find you, arrest you, and deport you,” she said.
That much was clear at Mr. Park’s final check-in with local immigration authorities last May. He said that instead of his sympathetic regular agent, a new officer told him that things would be different under “the new regime” as he informed him he would be deported. But because of his military service, he was allowed to arrange his own departure rather than be forcibly removed.
Mr. Park is likely to have only one chance to challenge the deportation order, said Danicole Ramos, an attorney at the University of Hawaii’s immigration law clinic who represents Mr. Park. The most important step will be vacating or reducing his bail-jumping charge, an offense treated as “unforgivable” by immigration law, Mr. Ramos said. Although he has requested both a reduction from the Queens district attorney’s office and a pardon from Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, a decision could take years.
While military service alone does not guarantee citizenship, Mr. Ramos — who is in the Air National Guard — said he believed Mr. Park would have had a strong case had the Army helped him apply before his life fell apart. Many veterans, Mr. Ramos said, are often confused about their citizenship status.
For now, Mr. Park is adjusting to new routines.
A once-active social life has turned into watching the Super Bowl alone in his apartment. His limited Korean prevents him from getting a job, so he kills time by wandering through the nearby alleys where, in lively restaurants and bars, happy young people congregate with flushed cheeks.
“I feel pretty out of place here,” he said.
Back home, he said, his 86-year-old mother’s health is worsening, and he wonders whether he will see her again before she dies. At some point, the V.A. will probably call him in for a checkup he cannot attend, which he fears might affect his disability payouts — his only source of income. He no longer has access to his PTSD therapy.
“It sneaks up on me,” he said. “Sometimes I just wake up crying. I still get nightmares here and there.”
At the clinic, tests revealed that Mr. Park’s torn eardrum had healed without any lasting damage.
“Regaining your hearing will take a bit of time,” the doctor said.
Feeling he had used up more than his share of luck in life, Mr. Park had already been halfway to accepting the worst. “I feel like I’ve been in overtime,” he said. But maybe, he hoped, he had a little bit still left.
Related Content
Advertisement
Meridiano
