Court Is Last Resort for Refugee Bride : Lawsuit: State Department stymied immigration of Vietnamese wife.

The last time Bai Phan saw his wife, they had just exchanged marriage vows at a city hall in Hong Kong.

Then he flew home to Westminster to begin the paperwork to bring his bride, Phuc Doan, to the United States. Doan, then 19, returned to the refugee detention camp in Hong Kong to count the days until the reunion.

That was in November, 1991. For the next three years, he says, he supplied whatever paperwork U.S. officials requested for her immigration. And still nothing happened.

Then last month, Phan was notified that his wife was one of 10 Vietnamese the Hong Kong government planned to put on a plane and deport to Vietnam.

As a last-minute effort, the 28-year-old man joined a 250-plaintiff class-action suit, alleging that the U.S. government violated a federal act and discriminated against Vietnamese nationals who are in detention camps by not processing their immigration visa applications.

“I didn’t know what to do or who to turn to,” said Phan, a landscaper who immigrated to the United States in 1984 and who is now a naturalized U.S. citizen. “When I was told about the lawsuit, I knew it was my last chance--my and my wife’s last chance.”

Phan and the other plaintiffs received an eleventh-hour reprieve when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in an emergency meeting Sunday ordered the State Department to begin processing visas to prevent the forced repatriations. A hearing has been set for April 7.

State Department officials could not be reached for comment Friday.

The plaintiffs, who include people in detention camps and their relatives in the United States, argued in the lawsuit filed Feb. 25 by the Virginia-based Legal Assistance for Vietnamese Asylum Seekers that State Department officials had violated the Immigration and Nationality Act by refusing to issue visas to Vietnamese who applied.

The State Department, in turn, has said only “political refugees” as defined by international agreement may qualify for U.S. visas. For other immigrants, only their own countries can issue passage to the United States.

The result is that Doan and about 26,500 Vietnamese “boat people” have been languishing in Hong Kong detention centers. The British colony hopes to empty the camps by the time the colony is returned to China in 1997.

According to attorneys for Vietnamese Asylum Seekers, the Immigration and Naturalization Service already had approved immigration petitions for Doan and most of the plaintiffs. But the State Department then abruptly refused to continue the process.

“What the U.S. government has also done is it has given these people false hopes and now it’s trying to pull the carpet out from under these people,” said Dan Wolf, founder of the asylum group and lead attorney in the case.

Such is the case with Phan, alleged local group volunteers.

Phan and Doan first knew each other through correspondence. They had heard about each other through a mutual friend, and for two years, religiously wrote to one another. They finally met in 1991 and were married in the same month.

“After the ceremony, we just sat across each other and smiled and were happy,” Phan recalled, speaking in Vietnamese. “We didn’t say much and didn’t even hold hands because the camp security guard” who had escorted her to the ceremony and who would take her back “was watching us at all times.”

Since then, he said, he has done everything the INS requested.

In March, 1992, the INS informed him that the petition for his wife’s immigration visa has been approved. All he had to do was pay the $834 to cover her transportation processing costs.

“I paid the money and I kept waiting for the day for someone to call me to tell me to go to the airport on such time and such date to pick up my wife,” Phan said as he sifted through a pile of official documents, letters and receipts.

Instead the U.S. consulate office in Hong Kong sent him a letter last December informing him that Doan would be sent back to Vietnam.

“That was the saddest and scariest day of my life,” Phan said.

Doan “doesn’t understand what’s going on, and I don’t know what to tell her,” he said, still bewildered. “For the past three years, they tell me what forms to send and I send them. I thought I’ve done everything possible, so I can’t even tell my wife what went wrong.”