Deportation for Vietnam ‘Enforcer’

A former political prisoner who brutalized fellow Vietnamese about 25 years ago to curry favor with communist guards was ordered Tuesday to be deported to Vietnam, ending an emotional ordeal for some of his victims who had been shocked to learn that he was living among them near Little Saigon.

Thi Dinh Bui, 62, a former captain in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, was accused by fellow prisoners of working as a camp enforcer for communist captors and killing two men in 1979 after a failed escape attempt from the “reeducation” camp where they were locked up.

U.S. Immigration Judge D.D. Sitgraves in San Pedro ordered deportation for Bui, who had asked to remain in his Garden Grove home with his wife and five children. Bui’s lawyer, Louis Piscopo, said the family was considering an appeal to the Office of Immigration Appeals.

Bui will remain locked up in the federal facility at San Pedro, where he has been held without bail since his arrest in 2003, said Bill Odencrantz, local director of field legal operations for the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Odencrantz said Bui probably would be deported before the end of the year.

Bui and others from what was then South Vietnam were detained in a “reeducation” camp near Hanoi.

After the fall of Saigon in April 1975, thousands of South Vietnamese were put in the camps for a decade or more by victorious communist officials who considered them security threats.

Bui was released from the camp in 1981 and entered the U.S. as a refugee in 1994. Witnesses at his immigration trial in March said he had served as an enforcer at Thanh Cam Camp from 1978 to 1981. In return, they said, he received favorable treatment and additional rations.

Bui was arrested in his Garden Grove home in August 2003 and charged with violating immigration law by having ordered, incited and participated in the persecution of others. He was found guilty at his March trial by Sitgraves.

Father Lee Huu “Andrew” Nguyen, a Roman Catholic priest, and other survivors testified that Bui was more vicious and cruel than the other camp enforcers.

On May 1, 1979, Nguyen and four others tried to escape the camp. Nguyen said Bui helped the communist guards catch the escapees and deliver their punishment.

According to a U.S. government affidavit, Bui kicked Nguyen into unconsciousness. Then he dragged the priest up a flight of stairs to a solitary-confinement cell.

Nguyen told U.S. officials that Bui beat one of the escaped prisoners to death. There was also testimony that Bui beat another escapee, then allowed him to starve to death, and that he beat a third escapee so severely that the man had permanent injuries.

At Bui’s trial, federal prosecutors produced six eyewitnesses who testified to his cruelty. Immigration officials called him a human rights abuser.

Bui entered the United States as a refugee in 1994 and became a legal permanent resident two years later.

Immigration officials said he would not have been allowed into the U.S. had he been truthful about his role as a camp enforcer for the communist government of Vietnam.

Piscopo said Bui has two older sisters and two children in Vietnam. He worked as a carrier for the Orange County Register and was a volunteer at a local Catholic church.

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Times staff writer Mai Tran contributed to this report.