L.A. Army veteran with Purple Heart self-deports to South Korea under threat of deportation

It is an army veteran who grew up in Van Nuys and threatened to deport and deport by the Federal Immigration forces this week.

On Monday, Senior Sae Joon Park, who legally migrated from South Korea at the age of seven, grew up in Koreatown and San Fernando Valley and said that he returned to his homeland at the age of 55, 55 years old.

“This is incredible. I still don’t believe it actually happened,” the park said in a telephone conversation from Incheon in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Orum I know I made my mistakes… But I am a violent criminal.

Tricia McLaughlin, the Secretary of the Ministry of National Security, who was asked to comment on the park, said that Park was a “comprehensive penalty history ve and a final lifting was given with the option of self -settlement.

The park said that in 1989, when the US forces occupied Panama’s de facto leader Manuel Noriega to dismiss the country, he suffered from the PPSB and addiction after injury.

However, the park, now a legal immigrant, is targeted by Federal officials in the recent migration raids of President Trump in Los Angeles and widespread protests throughout the country. According to the DHS, Federal officials arrested more than 1,600 immigrants in Southern California between 6 and 22 June to be deported.

If they serve in an honorable way in the US army for at least one year, a person without citizenship is entitled to citizenship. The park served less than a year without being injured and was discharged in an honorable way.

More than 158,000 immigrant service members since 2002 He became a US citizen.

As of 2021, the Veteran Works and the DHS department are responsible for ensuring that deported veterans are still able to reach their va advantages.

Park’s parents were divorced as a child and his mother emigrated from South Korea to the United States. A year later he followed him. They first lived in Koreatown, moved to Panorama City and then to Van Nuys. In 1988, he graduated from Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks.

At first, he struggled to learn English and get used to his classmates, and eventually, television editor Josh Belson became a part of the Southern California Kaykay and the surfing scene of the 1980s, when he met him. They’ve been close friends since then.

“He always has a smile, there is a very lively energy about him, Bel Belson said when they met a nearby high school. “He was the kind of one you wanted to be around.”

After graduation, the park said he wasn’t ready to go to university, so he joined the army.

“The army not only turned me into a man, but also provided me with a GI bill, so that you can go to the university later and they will pay for it. And the fact that I believe in the country, the United States,” he said. “That’s why I felt like I was doing something honorable. I was very proud of it when I joined the army.”

Park’s detachment was deployed to Panama in late 1989, where the first night they lived a fire department. The next day, Noriega’nın allegedly watched “Witches” raided the house of a M-16, he said. He said that they saw a Vudu worship room with blood painted and blood painted on the ground.

While there, he heard gunfire from the backyard and returned to the fire. He was shot twice, in the spine and at the bottom left. The bullet of the spine was partially misleading by the dog label, which he believed to be the cause of the Park is not paralyzed. The park was delayed by a military ambulance due to fire extinguishing, but a Vietnam veteran who lived nearby saved it.

“I remember just lying in his own blood pool and infiltrating it badly. So he actually went home, took his truck, put me behind his truck with two soldiers and took me to the hospital,” he said.

He was later released to an army hospital in San Antonio. A four -star general gave him a purple heart in his bed. At that time, President George W. Bush visited the wounded soldiers there.

The park spent there for about two weeks and then went home for about a month until I walked. His experience said he did not recognize mental problems.

“My biggest problem at that time was more than my injuries, then I didn’t know what happened, nobody did it, because there was no such thing as TSSB,” he said. Finally, “I noticed that I suffered from the TSSB, I saw nightmares every night, I couldn’t hear loud sounds, and at that time you heard the gunfire every night you left the house in Los Angeles, so I always treated paranoid.

The park began to take medication on its own with cannabis, which he said he said he said to sleep. But he started to do harder medications, finally broke cocaine. During the 1992 uprising, his mother and stepfather’s la store burned and married to Hawaii moved to Hawaii. After leaving the park and his wife, he moved to New York, where his addiction worsened.

“It really worsened. It just got out of control – every day, every night, all day – just smoking, everything is everything,” he said.

One night, in the late 2000s, when the police besieged his car, he met a drug dealer at a Taco Bell in Queens, and the dealer fled by leaving a large amount of cracks in the glove compartment.

A Judge sent Park twice to rehabilitation, but he said he wasn’t ready to be sober.

“I couldn’t just. “I would be good for 20 days and I would relapse. It was such a struggle. In the end, the judge told me, ‘Mr. Park, next time you will go to jail when you came to court with dirty urine.’ That’s why I was scared.”

The park did not return to court, went to Los Angeles, and then jumped with bail, a aggravated crime, and returned to Hawaii.

Um At that time, I didn’t know that bail jumping was a aggravated crime charges, and when it was combined with my drug use, it could be deported to my green card for someone like me, ”he said.

The USA was sent to search for Marshals Park and said that he returned in August 2009 after hearing it, because he did not want to be arrested in front of his two children.

He was sentenced to two years in prison, and said the immigrant officials detained him for six months after being released while he was fighting for deportation. Eventually, a prosecution was released under the “postponed action olan, which was the discretion of a prosecution to be deported by DHS.

Since then, Park had to check with the federal authorities every year and show that he was employed and sober. Meanwhile, two children who were currently 28 and 25 years old had custody. He was also looking at his 85 -year -old mother, who was in the early stages of dementia.

Lastly, the park was about to clarify and detain, but the immigrant agents placed him an ankle monitor and gave him three weeks to take his jobs regularly and uniquely. It is not allowed to return to the United States for 10 years. He’s worried about his mother’s passing and his daughter will miss the wedding.

The Park said, “This is the biggest part. But it could be much worse. I look at this way,” he said. “That’s why I think I’m grateful for removing the United States without being detained.”

“I always assume that it was just a green card, legal residence, just like having citizenship,” he added. “I never felt that I had to get citizenship. And this is just to be honest. When I was a child growing up in the United States, I always thought, hey, I have a green card, I am a legal residence, just like a citizen.”

He’s hugged his situation since then.

“Well. I’m losing. I can’t stop crying. “I just want to go back to my family and take care of my mother … I’m a mess.”

Times staff writer Nathan Solis contributed to this report.