It wasn't until Pham Chi Cuong saw the plane waiting to deport him from the United States that it sunk in that he was about to be sent back to Vietnam, the country he fled in 1993.
Cuong and at least three other deportees who had lived in America for decades were returned to Vietnam in December 2017 as part of a renewed Trump administration push to deport immigrants convicted of crimes in the United States.
The expulsions were carried out despite a 2008 bilateral agreement that Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in the United States prior to 1995, many of whom had supported the now defunct U.S.-backed state of South Vietnam, would not be sent back.