Witnessing the strife of Afghans is “heart-wrenching for families who escaped Saigon,” one community advocate said. “We know the desperation, the loss of homeland and fear and panic they must be feeling.”
Duong, a civil engineer for the South Vietnamese government, had worked closely with the Americans during the Vietnam War. He knew he would be punished should the communists capture the capital.
Eventually, with the help of U.S. reporters, Duong was admitted inside the building, where he waited in agony for hours before he was airlifted out of the country by a military helicopter. In subsequent years, nine of Duong’s siblings would join him in the U.S. Their children now live all across the country., Duong began reliving one of the worst days of his life.
Witnessing the strife of Afghans is “heart-wrenching for families who escaped Saigon,” said Duong’s niece Minh-Thu Pham, a board member of the Progressive Vietnamese American Organization, which is known as PIVOT. “We know the desperation, the loss of homeland and fear and panic they must be feeling.”on PIVOT’s behalf, urged Biden to remove the cap on the number of Afghan refugee visas and Special Immigrant Visas.
“There’s a large emphasis on Vietnam,” he said, “but we saw the same scenes in Cambodia and Laos. We saw photos of people scrambling to get on planes and boats.” Less than a month after the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam, Congress passed the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, a law that provided over $450 million to admitfrom South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, most of whom assisted U.S. forces during the war. The political willpower to support Southeast Asians was striking given that the law wasn’t popular with the public. A 1975 Gallup poll showed that onlyAfter the initial move to protect the allies of the U.S.
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