After hiding in Thailand for seven years, two Cambodian journalists arrived in the United States last year on work visas, aiming to keep providing people in their Southeast Asian homeland with objective, factual news through Radio Free Asia.
But Vuthy Tha and Hour Hum now say their jobs and legal status in the U.S. are at risk after President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order gutting the government-run U.S. Agency for Global Media. The agency funds Radio Free Asia and other outlets tasked with delivering uncensored information to parts of the world under authoritarian rule and often without a free press of their own.
“It fell out of sky,” Vuthy, a single father of two small children, said through a translator about the Trump administration’s decision, which he says threatens to upend his life.
“I am very regretful that our listeners cannot receive the accurate news,” Hour said, also through a translator.
Both men said they’re worried about providing for their families and being allowed to stay in the U.S. They say it’s impossible to return to Cambodia, a single-party state hostile to independent media where they fear being persecuted for their journalistic work.
The administration has been dismantling or slashing the size of federal agencies, leading tens of thousands of government workers and contractors to be fired or put on leave. But the targeting of the U.S. Agency for Global Media,
whose decades-old networks aim to extend American influence abroad, means journalists who have defied authoritarian regimes to help fulfill a U.S. mission of delivering pro-democracy programming could be deported and face harassment and persecution in their homelands.
Eleven journalists associated with the U.S.-funded media outlets are behind bars overseas, including RFA’s Shin Daewe, who is serving 15 years in Myanmar on a charge of supporting terrorism.
At least 84 U.S. Agency for Global Media, or USAGM, journalists in the United States on work visas could face deportation, including at least 23 “at serious risk of being immediately arrested upon arrival and potentially imprisoned,” according to the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders and a coalition of 36 human rights organizations.
“It is outrageous that these journalists, who risk their lives to expose the extent of repression in their home countries, might be completely abandoned,” said Thibaut Bruttin, director general of Reporters Without Borders.
