He earned a Purple Heart fighting for the US. Swept up in Trump’s immigration crackdown, he now fights to come home

When Sae Joon Park orders pancakes and walks past soldiers in uniform, hearing a language he hasn’t spoken regularly since self‑deporting from the United States last summer, it feels – for a few hours – like he’s home.

Instead, he’s thousands of miles away, behind the guarded gates of Camp Humphreys, a US Army garrison south of South Korea’s capital Seoul with a sprawling campus of chain restaurants, housing blocks and training grounds.

“When I’m on base, it actually feels like I’m in America,” says the 56‑year‑old Army veteran, who returned to his country of birth last June, a place he had not lived since he was a child.

A Purple Heart recipient, Park is among a number of noncitizen US military veterans who have self-deported or been expelled from the country they fought for under President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown – which immigration attorneys say has revived old removal orders and sharply curtailed prosecutorial discretion. Park, a former green-card holder, self-deported last summer after immigration officials unexpectedly threatened to handcuff and arrest him at a scheduled immigration check-in due to a prior criminal conviction.

His case drew national attention in December when lawmakers pressed then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a testy congressional hearing about veterans swept up in the crackdown. DHS has continued to point to Park’s criminal record on drug possession, bail jumping and related charges when asked about his immigration case.

Park is pursuing multiple legal pathways he hopes will bring him home, including requesting a pardon from the governor of New York for the convictions that prompted his removal order. But those processes could take years, his attorney says, and none guarantee success.

In the meantime, his case has catalyzed a debate over the hard-line approach to Trump’s immigration crackdown and whether a group of people ready to give their lives for the US should be expelled from the country they swore to defend and protect, regardless of legal status or criminal convictions.

At just 7 years old, Park traveled alone from South Korea after his parents’ divorce to join his mother in Miami, where he learned early to fend for himself.

“Miami was tough,” Park told CNN. “I would always get in fights … I was the only Asian kid in the entire school, so I would get picked on a lot.”

Within a year, he and his mom moved to Los Angeles, where Park said he spent the rest of his childhood, surrounded by extended family in Koreatown and the San Fernando Valley. His mother worked multiple waitressing jobs before eventually running small businesses selling clothing and records.

Needing “direction” after graduating high school, Park enlisted in the military with his best friend, at the advice of his uncle, the oldest of his mother’s 11 siblings and a South Korean Marine colonel.

After basic training, in October 1989, he was stationed at Fort Clayton in Panama, where within months he was plunged into what the Army called at the time “the largest and most complex combat operation” since the Vietnam War, when the US launched “Operation Just Cause” to depose Panama’s drug-trafficking strongman leader Manuel Noriega.

“I got there just in time for the training and to go into war,” he told CNN.

In a matter of days, Park was involved in a mission that would alter his life – and earn him one of the most esteemed decorations in the US military – when Park’s platoon raided the house of a Brazilian woman described as Noriega’s “witch,” who reportedly performed occult rituals for the dictator.

After the operation in the house – where closets were filled, he said, with “crates of cocaine” and rooms with jars of human body parts – a firefight erupted outside. He was shot twice – in the spine and the lower back – before being dragged to safety, badly bleeding and “struggling for every breath of air.”

Miraculously, he survived.

Park was awarded a Purple Heart, a distinction for those injured or killed in combat, in a bedside ceremony at the San Antonio Army hospital he was airlifted to.

Park doesn’t remember much of this time, except being heavily drugged and unable to move. Returning to civilian life, he struggled with what he would later understand to be post‑traumatic stress disorder.

“After I came out of the military … I’m trying to live my life as a twenty, twenty-one-year-old, and I was really messed up,” he told CNN.

Loud noises triggered panic. Nightmares kept him awake.

Marijuana blunted the pain, at first, he said. But he soon turned to harder drugs, a pathway many veterans struggle with. Several studies show PTSD and substance abuse frequently co-occur, with one study shared by the US Department of Veteran Affairs finding that veterans with lifelong PTSD were three times more likely to meet the criteria for a drug use disorder.

Park said there wasn’t the same level of awareness around PTSD in the early ‘90s, and he didn’t feel like he could seek help – or even voice his struggles: “I couldn’t share this with anyone … I couldn’t go get help the right way.”

Purple Heart veteran describes why he self-deported

Purple Heart veteran describes why he self-deported

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As the years passed, he bounced between locations and jobs: helping at his aunt’s supermarket, working as a Korean tour guide, selling cars. After the supermarket burned down and his mom’s store was looted during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, his family relocated to Hawaii.

He married, moved to New York City and eventually separated, a period during which his drug addiction deepened, leading to the legal trouble his immigration attorney says came back to haunt him decades later.

“The drugs just took over everything … It ruined my marriage … it kind of destroyed my life all the way through 40 years old,” Park told CNN.

He was arrested buying drugs in 2007 and later convicted of possession of a controlled substance. Afraid he would fail his court-ordered drug testing while on probation, he fled New York, missing a court appearance, and returned to his family in Hawaii.

His family later convinced him to turn himself in after US marshals knocked on their door while he was out. He was convicted of second-degree bail jumping – an aggravated felony under immigration law – and sentenced to prison in New York before being released in 2011.

When he was released, Park said Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were waiting for him due to a removal order issued by an immigration judge the year prior as a result of his criminal convictions, court records provided by his attorney showed.

After six months in ICE detention, Park was released and granted deferred action on his removal order based on his “equities of being a Purple Heart veteran,” his attorney, Danicole Ramos said, referring to a form of prosecutorial discretion that defers deportation without granting lawful status. The green card he came to the US on as a child was revoked and he was barred from traveling abroad, but he was allowed to remain in the country and work legally.

For 15 years, he did just that – until a routine immigration check‑in last June, when an ICE officer cited Park’s prior removal older and threatened to detain him on the spot, according to Ramos, who attended the check-in.

Immigration attorneys say that under the Trump administration’s intensified focus on deportations, long-dormant removal cases like Park’s, which had been allowed to remain on hold for years, have become an enforcement priority. Deportation cases often hinge on technical distinctions in federal law, and outcomes can vary widely based on past convictions and timing.

“That’s the authority of prosecutorial discretion – to say ‘I can revoke your deferred action whenever I want.’ Today’s the day,” said Michelle Perez, a Virginia-based immigration attorney not involved in Park’s case.

“Prosecutorial discretion is basically dead,” Perez told CNN. For people with prior deportation orders, immigration officials can now “snatch you up, put you on a plane and throw you out quickly,” she said.

Ramos said they reached a deal in which Park wouldn’t be detained if he wore an ankle monitor – and self-deported within three weeks.

After 49 years in America, Park packed his life into two suitcases and a golf bag and boarded a one-way flight to South Korea, a country he hadn’t visited in decades, and left behind his two children, a son, 29, and a daughter, 25.

When asked about Park’s case, a DHS spokesperson pointed to Park’s criminal record and the standing removal order.

“Sae Joon Park’s extensive criminal history includes convictions for possessing, manufacturing, or selling a dangerous weapon, carrying a loaded firearm in a public place, assault, and criminal possession of a controlled substance,” DHS said in a statement to CNN. “US military service alone does not automatically grant lawful immigration status, or exempt aliens from the consequences of violating US immigration laws.”

Park acknowledged his other convictions but told CNN his lawyer advised him not to discuss them in detail. He disputes DHS’ characterization of his record, saying he “was never a violent criminal.”

It’s unclear how many noncitizen military veterans have been forced to leave the country or self-deport under Trump’s immigration crackdown. Last April, Trump rescinded Biden‑era guidance that instructed ICE officers to treat military service as a “significant mitigating factor” in deportation decisions, stating instead that service “alone does not automatically exempt” someone from removal.

Democrats in Congress have pressed the administration on the issue, citing in a letter to Trump administration officials that estimates suggest the number of deported veterans is more than 10,000 individuals. A DHS response to lawmakers said, as of early August, 107 veterans were on ICE’s non‑detained docket, 14 were in detention and 8 had been deported since Trump took office again, in cases the department described as involving serious criminal conduct.

Ramos said immigration law doesn’t allow a judge to consider military service as a mitigating factor if a person has been convicted of certain crimes. He said if bail-jumping weren’t included in that list of otherwise serious violent crimes, an immigration judge might never have issued a removal order for the Purple Heart recipient.

Under federal immigration law, second‑degree bail jumping is classified as an aggravated felony, a designation that generally bars lawful permanent residents from seeking cancellation of removal and most other forms of relief. Once removability is established, Perez said, judges have “no leeway” to weigh mitigating factors such as military service.

“It pretty much makes you ineligible for the majority of relief, regardless if you’re a resident or not, or in the military or not,” Perez said.

Park’s path back to the US now hinges on two pending requests in New York: a pardon from Gov. Kathy Hochul, and asking the Queens County district attorney to reduce his felony bail‑jumping conviction to a misdemeanor. Either could get his deportation case reopened and potentially lead to his removal order being vacated.

“He has to prove there was some procedural defect,” Perez said, which most commonly would be that he was not properly advised of the immigration consequences.

Even if a state court vacates his conviction, that would simply allow an immigration judge to reconsider his case. “It’s not a slam dunk,” Perez said. A judge could decline to reopen the case or ultimately uphold the removal order, leaving Park to continue fighting the decision.

And even a favorable ruling would not return Park home immediately. Because he is now outside the US, he would still need to navigate the slow, bureaucratic process of obtaining a visa through federal immigration authorities and a US consulate abroad, which can stretch for years.

“He has three major hurdles,” Perez said: securing post‑conviction relief, persuading an immigration judge to reopen his case, and then obtaining permission to reenter from abroad. The “difficulty level of each one of them is very high.”

Perez said such relief is highly discretionary and varies by state, and even if granted, additional immigration proceedings would be required before any lawful return.

Meanwhile, in South Korea, Park is trying to rebuild a life in the country he left as a child. He speaks limited Korean and cannot read or write it, relying on relatives to navigate paperwork and daily logistics. He recently relocated to the southern city of Busan, where he fills his days with long walks as he tries to quiet the returning nightmares.

He speaks often with his son and daughter, but he recently missed his son’s birthday. His 86‑year‑old mother, who has dementia, frequently asks why he is in Korea. He can’t bring himself to tell her.

Not knowing, he believes, hurts less.