Returns From Ho Chi Minh City : Agran Seeks to Unite 5 Vietnamese Families

Irvine Mayor Larry Agran, recently returned from Vietnam, said he asked officials in Ho Chi Minh City to help reunify five families who have relatives in Orange County.

“Now, it’s up to the Vietnamese,” Agran said Wednesday, a day after his return to the United States from a 12-day trip overseas.

“I think this is a real test to see if humanitarian goals will be met by the Vietnamese (government). If they are met, then it could result in many more future trips by similar delegations,” he said.

Agran was part of a 14-member delegation from California that included Vietnamese-Americans and state Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles), who initiated the trip. It was believed to be the first time the Vietnamese government had accepted a delegation that included Vietnamese-American private citizens in addition to the two elected officials.

Agran declined to identify the five families, but said that three of the five have relatives in Irvine.

Three cases involved reunification based on medical grounds, and the other two cases involved a husband who was separated 14 years from his wife and children who live in Irvine, and a Vietnamese woman in a refugee camp married to an American man.

“We’re not going to identify any of the cases involved until we are absolutely sure that they are coming to the United States,” Agran said.

He said if Vietnamese and American officials in Bangkok, Thailand, both “follow through” on the special cases, “we will probably be able to point to some significant progress within the next 3 months.”

The five cases were among more than 500 reunification cases that the delegation took with them to Vietnam to plead on various grounds, including medical reasons, protracted delays and other compelling circumstances.

Delegation members, including Torres and Agran, also met with Vietnam’s Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach and other top-ranking officials in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly called Saigon.

Agran was invited by Torres because he is an elected official in Orange County, which has one of the largest concentrations of Vietnamese in the United States, and because Agran had expressed an interest in the trip, he said.

The idea for the trip grew out of Torres’ solo trip last year to the Far East, where he met and had discussions with Thach on reunification. Agran said the delegation also met State Department officials in Bangkok for several days before spending 8 days in Vietnam.

Most of the trip was funded by private individuals through a refugee fund-raising project based in Sacramento. However, Agran said he paid for his own expenses.