"Disciplined, Joyful, and Healthy": After a Year in South Sudan, a Vietnamese Deportee Finally Goes Home

At Juba International Airport in South Sudan on Friday, a small group of officials and journalists gathered to watch 44-year-old Tuan Phan board a flight that would, after nearly a year of forced exile in one of the world's most unstable countries, finally take him home to Vietnam. His departure marks only the second successful repatriation out of a group of eight men whose names became, almost against their will, a flashpoint in one of the most legally and ethically contested chapters of the Trump administration's immigration enforcement agenda: the third-country deportation program, under which the United States has sent migrants — not to their countries of origin, but to nations with which they have no prior connection whatsoever — as a tool of mass removal when their home countries refuse to accept them back.

This is the story of how Tuan Phan ended up in South Sudan, what his year there looked like, and why six other men remain there still.

Who Is Tuan Phan and Why He Was Deportable

Tuan Phan's story begins decades before South Sudan ever entered the picture. According to court documents, he moved to the United States as a child in 1991, settling into American life as a refugee or immigrant from Vietnam during the wave of post-war Vietnamese resettlement that brought hundreds of thousands of families to the US in the years following the fall of Saigon.

In 2000, shortly after turning eighteen, Phan was convicted in connection with a shooting that resulted in someone's death, and received a 25-year prison sentence. Having spent the subsequent decades incarcerated, Phan had completed — or nearly completed — that sentence by the time immigration authorities moved to act on the deportation order that his criminal conviction had triggered decades earlier under US immigration law, which provides for the removal of non-citizens convicted of serious or violent crimes once they finish serving their sentences.

The complication that made Phan's case, and the cases of the seven other men deported alongside him, into a genuinely novel legal and humanitarian problem is straightforward: Vietnam, like several of the other deportees' countries of origin, would not accept him back. Countries refusing to accept the return of their own nationals who have been ordered deported from the United States is a long-standing friction point in US immigration enforcement, and it is precisely the scenario that the Trump administration's third-country deportation program was designed to circumvent.

The Third-Country Deportation Program: A Novel and Contested Tool

Under the third-country deportation program, when a migrant's home country refuses or is unable to accept their return, US authorities arrange for that individual to be deported instead to an entirely unrelated nation — one that has agreed, through some bilateral arrangement with Washington, to accept the deportee regardless of any prior connection between that individual and the receiving country.

The Department of Homeland Security has characterized the population subject to this program in stark terms: as DHS stated at the time of the original deportations, the eight men sent to South Sudan in July 2025 had completed or nearly completed prison sentences in the United States for serious, violent crimes, including murder, sexual assault, lascivious acts with a child, and robbery. None of the eight is a South Sudanese national. They came from Cuba, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, and one man — Dian Peter Domach — who was in fact the lone South Sudanese national in the group and was released upon arrival in his actual home country.

The broader scale of the program, as tracked by the independent monitoring initiative Third Country Deportation Watch, shows that more than 180 people have been sent to various third countries under this scheme since its implementation — South Sudan representing just one, albeit one of the most controversial, of the destination countries involved.

Why South Sudan, of All Places

The selection of South Sudan as a receiving nation for US deportees has drawn particularly intense criticism given the country's circumstances. South Sudan has an exceptionally poor human rights record, a high level of endemic corruption, and a deeply unstable political situation — armed conflict within the country displaced more than half a million people in 2025 alone, according to United Nations figures. It is, by virtually every measure used by international human rights monitors, among the least stable and least rights-respecting states in the world — making it a destination that critics argue was selected not because it offered any safe or humane environment for the deportees, but precisely because its government was willing to accept them in exchange for concessions from Washington.

The specific nature of the deal between the United States and South Sudan's government remains murky, even now, nearly a year after the original deportations. State Department documents that have become public show that South Sudan made specific requests of the United States after agreeing to accept the men — including sanctions relief for a former senior South Sudanese official, and US support for the prosecution of a prominent opposition figure within South Sudan. What exactly the South Sudanese government received in return for accepting these eight men, or what additional concessions may have been exchanged, has not been fully and transparently disclosed by either government.

The deportations themselves followed a weeks-long legal fight in US courts in mid-2025, with rights groups arguing throughout that the practice of deporting migrants to third countries with no connection to them violated both international law and the basic rights of the migrants involved. Those legal challenges ultimately failed at the highest level: the US Supreme Court ruled in June 2025 that the government could proceed with swift removals of migrants to third countries, clearing the way for the deportations to go forward as originally planned.

A Year in Custody: "Disciplined, Joyful, and Healthy"

For nearly a year, Tuan Phan and the other deportees were held in South Sudan under conditions that international human rights monitors have struggled to independently verify. Reporting indicates the men were held in a gated house under the supervision of armed guards — a description that places their detention somewhere between traditional incarceration and a more loosely supervised but still highly restricted form of confinement.

South Sudan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has consistently characterized the men's treatment in positive terms. Spokesperson Ambassador Agok Anyar, addressing reporters at Friday's press briefing in Juba, said of Phan specifically: "We are grateful that while in our custody, Mr. Phan was very disciplined, joyful, and importantly, he remained healthy. We wish him a safe trip home." Anyar struck a similar note in earlier comments to local outlet Eye Radio, again describing Phan's demeanor throughout his detention as "disciplined, joyful," and confirming that his health had remained stable.

These characterizations from South Sudanese officials are, notably, the primary — and in some cases the only — publicly available account of how the men were actually treated during their detention. Michael Bochenek, senior counsel for Human Rights Watch, identified precisely this problem as the central concern with the entire arrangement: independent human rights observers have not been permitted to visit the detained men, meaning there has been no independent verification of their treatment or living conditions whatsoever. "There's been no independent check on people's treatment and conditions of confinement," Bochenek said, adding that this absence of oversight "raises serious questions about South Sudan's compliance with human rights norms and essential safeguards against abuses in detention." It is also unclear, according to AP's reporting, whether Gutierrez, Phan, or any of the other deportees had meaningful access to legal representation at any point during their time in South Sudanese custody.

The Path Home: How Vietnam Came to Accept Him Back

The mechanism by which Tuan Phan was ultimately able to leave South Sudan reflects a quiet diplomatic resolution rather than any dramatic legal victory or court order. His return was facilitated by the Government of Vietnam, working in direct coordination with South Sudan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. Ambassador Anyar framed the development specifically as Vietnam's government choosing, after nearly a year, to accept Phan back: "Today, one of those deportees, with the acceptance of his country, Vietnam, is voluntarily returning home to be with his family."

The precise reasons why Vietnam changed its earlier position and agreed to accept Phan's return — after having presumably declined to accept him in the first instance, which is what made him eligible for third-country deportation to South Sudan to begin with — have not been detailed in available reporting. What is clear is that the diplomatic channel that ultimately worked ran not through Washington, but through direct engagement between Hanoi and Juba.

Phan is only the second person from the original group of eight to be successfully repatriated. The first was Jesus Muñoz-Gutierrez, a Mexican national, who was flown back to Mexico in September 2025 — also following a diplomatic arrangement between South Sudan and his home country's government, rather than through any US-driven process. CBS News's earlier coverage of Gutierrez's repatriation noted the same unresolved ambiguities that have characterized the entire program throughout: whether deportees had access to legal counsel, and the precise terms under which receiving and sending countries agreed to the arrangements, both remained unclear at the time.

Who Remains Behind in Juba

With Phan's departure, five members of the original group of eight remain in South Sudan, held under the same custodial arrangement and the same lack of independent oversight that has defined the program since its inception. South Sudanese officials confirmed that the remaining individuals are nationals of Cuba, Myanmar, and Laos. Dian Peter Domach, the sole South Sudanese national among the original eight, was released immediately upon the group's arrival in July 2025, since South Sudan is, for him, simply home.

South Sudan's government has indicated that diplomatic efforts to repatriate the remaining detained men are ongoing — though the specific pace and likelihood of success for those efforts, given that they appear to depend entirely on each individual's home government independently agreeing to accept them back, remains genuinely uncertain. The precedents set by Gutierrez's return to Mexico in September and Phan's return to Vietnam this week — both arranged through bilateral diplomatic channels rather than any broader resolution of the program itself — suggest that any further repatriations will likely occur the same way: one country, one negotiation, one departure at a time, with no indication that the underlying third-country deportation framework itself is being reconsidered or wound down by Washington.

The Bigger Picture: A Program That Continues

Tuan Phan's flight out of Juba on Friday closes one individual chapter of a program that, more broadly, remains very much active. More than 180 people have been deported to various third countries under the scheme according to Third Country Deportation Watch's tracking, of whom the eight men sent specifically to South Sudan represent a small but disproportionately scrutinized subset — largely because of the extreme and well-documented instability of the receiving country itself, and the specific, troubling questions raised by the State Department documents describing what South Sudan's government requested, and may have received, in exchange for accepting them.

For Tuan Phan, the year is now over. He boarded his flight at Juba International Airport on Friday and is returning, after 25 years of incarceration in the United States followed by nearly a year of detention in a country he had no prior connection to whatsoever, to a country he left as a child more than three decades ago — to be, as Ambassador Anyar put it, with his family once again. For the five men still held in that gated house in Juba, and for the broader population of deportees scattered across third countries around the world under this still-active program, no comparable resolution has yet arrived.

Sources

1. Associated Press / ABC News — Vietnamese man deported from U.S. to South Sudan is repatriated after months in detention
2. The Washington Post — Vietnamese man deported from U.S. to South Sudan is repatriated after year in detention
3. US News & World Report (AP) — Vietnamese Man Deported From U.S. to South Sudan Is Repatriated After Months in Detention
4. US News & World Report (Reuters) — Vietnamese Man Deported to South Sudan by US Leaves for Home
5. Eye Radio — "Joyful to return home" – Vietnamese US deportee returns home after a year in South Sudan
6. WINK News (AP) — Vietnamese man deported from U.S. to South Sudan is repatriated after months in detention
7. Ground News — Vietnamese Man Deported to South Sudan by US Leaves for Home
8. CBS News Colorado (AP) — South Sudan repatriates Mexican man deported from U.S. in July