Thirty Cambodians who had been living in the United States have arrived in Cambodia after being deported under a U.S. law that allows the repatriation of immigrants who have committed felonies and have not become U.S. citizens.
The group that arrived Wednesday is the latest to be sent to Cambodia under a 2002 bilateral agreement. More than 500 other Cambodians have already been repatriated.
The program is controversial because it breaks up families, and in some cases the returnees have never lived in Cambodia, having been born to refugees who fled to camps in Thailand to escape the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime that ruled Cambodia in 1975-79.
Cambodia, which has rocky relations with the U.S., informally suspended the program in 2017 but it resumed this year.
