Two Americans sentenced to prison in Vietnam. One got out; the other can’t.

William Nguyen and Michael Nguyen don’t know each other, but their lives are intertwined.

William Nguyen, an American citizen, participated in a political protest in Vietnam last summer, a rally that Michael Nguyen, an American who lives in Orange, was accused by Vietnamese officials of helping to organize.

And as a result of the protest — staged June 10, 2018, in Ho Chi Minh City — both men were arrested.

Initially, William Nguyen was detained for 40 days. When he was convicted, following a brief trial, he faced up to seven years in Vietnamese prison. Instead, authorities ordered his deportation, which meant returning to his then home town of Houston.

Michael Nguyen was detained for nearly a year before he got his own four-hour trial, late last month. After he was found guilty of conspiring to overthrow the Vietnamese government, allegedly by seeking out protesters who would go to demonstrations and occupy government buildings and possibly use Molotov cocktails and slingshots, he was sentenced to 12 years.

As of this writing, he’s still expecting to serve that time.

“There’s a thread that runs through these cases,” said Rep. Alan Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, who was involved in trying to secure the release of both men.

Both men, he said, were arrested as Vietnam was seeing its biggest political demonstrations in decades.

Now, California resident Michael Nguyen, sentenced June 24 in Ho Chi Minh City, has to decide if he’ll appeal. In Vietnam, that choice comes with a huge risk. If he appeals and the court rules against him, Michael Nguyen’s 12-year sentence could be extended into something even longer.

His wife, Helen Nguyen, said this week that she did not yet know what her husband will do. A mother of four school-age daughters, she has been pulling extra shifts as a surgical nurse at UC Irvine Medical Center and Kaiser Permanente to keep the family’s finances together. The family, she said, is holding together through prayer and the emotional support of their many relatives.

Meanwhile,  American legislators who support U.S. citizens facing political prosecutions overseas, are considering ways to get Michael Nguyen home.

“We can make life difficult (for Vietnam),” said Lowenthal, who is co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on Vietnam.

Lowenthal mentioned three options.

One would be to approach the State Department about placing Vietnam on a black list of sorts by naming it a Country of Particular Concern, meaning it is a rogue violator of religious persecution.

Another would be to tap the Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, meaning the U.S. could place financial and travel restrictions on Vietnam to pressure the country into respecting human rights.

A third, Lowenthal said, would be to push his own bill, the Vietnam Human Rights Act, co-sponsored by Rep. Chris Smith, R-New Jersey, which calls for release of political and religious prisoners.

“We’re a trading partner with Vietnam,” Lowenthal said. “(But) if they’re arresting American citizens and not telling us until the last minute, having a trial which seems like a phony trial, with decisions made beforehand, not allowing him to have an attorney…  We have to re-examine our relationship.

“This is an important milestone, what’s happening.”

Medieval conditions

The protest last year in Ho Chi Minh City was against a proposed law to create special economic zones. Many Vietnamese opposed the plan because they believe the zones will benefit Chinese investors.

William Nguyen, then 32, arrived in Vietnam the night before the planned rally. The Yale graduate was studying for a master’s degree in public policy at the National University of Singapore and was visiting Vietnam to participate in what he believed would be peaceful demonstrations.

On Twitter, at the time, he shared his enthusiasm for the rally:

“I can’t stress how enormous of an achievement this is for the #Vietnamese people. The communist government is allowing people to assemble peacefully and the people are exercising their civic duty to protest injustice.”

But the next day, June 10, 2018, the march turned violent. Video of the event caught images of men, presumably undercover police officers, beating William Nguyen and dragging him into the back of a truck. He was eventually charged with “disrupting public order” and “causing traffic congestion.”

William Nguyen described the conditions of his prison as “medieval.”

Prisoners slept in poorly ventilated rooms on thin straw mats. Small sacks of sugar served as pillows.

“I developed calluses on my spine and on the sides of my feet from tossing and turning,” he said.

He and other prisoners developed exercise routines “to keep our physical and mental bearings,” he said. And they played games like chess and Chinese chess, using boards fashioned out of cardboard and game pieces made from the caps of toothpaste tubes or bottles.

“The amount of human ingenuity and creativity in there is mind blowing.”

When the investigation phase of his case was done, William Nguyen was moved to a larger cell, holding up to 14 prisoners. That room, he said, was considered “nicer” because it faced an inner courtyard and allowed sunlight.

“You could actually keep track of time of day,” he said.

While there, William Nguyen said, he met another American, James Nguyen, who had a family-run flooring business in Worcester, Mass.,and an American woman, Angel Phan.

Both James Nguyen and Phan were accused of belonging to the California-based Provisional Central Government of Vietnam, an anti-communist organization. Last year, James Nguyen and Phan were each sentenced to 14 years in prison. Lowenthal said they both declined help from the American government, and today both remain imprisoned in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, since his deportation, William Nguyen has moved from Houston to Singapore and has begun working with Vietnamese activists and democracy groups.

“There really has to be systemic change to solve the overarching problem of Vietnamese human rights abuses,” he said.

Two cases

The charges against Michael Nguyen — conspiring to overthrow the government — are more serious than the charges faced by William Nguyen.

“If I had been charged with ‘overthrowing the state’ my fate would have differed little from Michael’s, social media attention or not,” William Nguyen said. The Vietnamese government, he said, does not tolerate “any threats to its power.”

But 55-year-old Michael Phuong Minh Nguyen, as he’s also known, was not involved in any political activity, according to his family in Orange. He ran a small printing company in Garden Grove, a business that’s closed as a result of his long absence. And Lowenthal said he’s not aware that Nguyen was politically active in Little Saigon, a community where domestic Vietnamese politics are tracked closely.

Michael Nguyen, said his family, was in Vietnam to visit friends.

But during his trial he plead guilty, in the hope that his sentence would be reduced and he’d be allowed to go back to California, his family said. He was tried with three others, all Vietnamese nationals. Two were sentenced to terms of eight and 10 years, while the third was sentenced to one year for failing to report the others.

In the U.S., Michael Nguyen has bipartisan support from more than two dozen lawmakers. His representative, Rep. Katie Porter, D-Irvine, invited Helen Nguyen as her guest to President Trump’s State of the Union address last February to bring more attention to his plight. The family was disappointed that his case apparently was not brought up earlier this year, when President Donald Trump visited Vietnam and met with Vietnamese officials.

Vietnam has been cracking down on political dissent. The country this year enacted a new cyber security law that has been widely criticized as a totalitarian move to control information and dissent.

Amnesty International, which monitors human rights, says the country has 128 prisoners of conscience.  The 88 Project, which advocates for Vietnamese advocates and freedom of expression, says it is tracking 368 people, including 264 activists in prison.

The crackdown is part of a broader pattern. Vietnam’s constitution allows for social protest, but exercising that right is, according to Lowenthal, discouraged: “You better not do it.”

The demonstrations last summer against the planned special economic zones were preceded by protests in 2016 after a toxic chemical waste disaster from the Formosa Plastics steel plant company killed off marine life and impacted fishing villages.

Such massive protests, both in 2016 and 2018, are an anomaly in Vietnam, Lowenthal pointed out.

“Michael is caught in issues far beyond Michael, at a time when the government was very paranoid, was not talking with our ambassador or the United States about those protests, or what was really going on,” said Lowenthal, who represents parts of Orange County’s Little Saigon. “(The Vietnamese government) didn’t even tell us he was arrested. “

A few years ago, Vietnam released some prisoners of conscience. But since then, Lowenthal said, the country’s stance on dissent has hardened. And that was solidified after President Trump pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which involved trade and tariff rules and was considered a key U.S. strategy to counter Chinese economic influence.

“Once we pulled out, Vietnam moved much more away from us,” Lowenthal said. “Then comes the Formosa chemical spill, and also the move to provide economic zones, and people demonstrated.”

“When that collapsed, Vietnam began to move away from us,” Lowenthal said.

The arrests of American citizens in Vietnam is rare. And a high-profile case like Michael Nguyen’s sends a message that the communist country “will not tolerate American citizens or others getting involved in Vietnamese politics or political discussion of any kind,”  said Rep. Lou Correa, D-Santa Ana.

But he added that as a key trade partner with the United States, Vietnam could be vulnerable to sanctions, and the lack of action on that front sends a subtle message of approval.

“We tacitly are tolerating this sort of behavior, which is not in conformity with standards of human rights and freedom,” said Correa, who has represented the Little Saigon community in different capacities for some two decades.

“We’re sending a mixed message to Vietnam. We don’t like what you do, but we’ll look the other way.

“This is very inconsistent.”

Neither Correa nor Lowenthal, both Democrats, could say whether Michael Nguyen would be back home under a different administration. But Brad Adams, executive director of the Asian division of Human Rights Watch, said Vietnam has had a long history of human rights abuses, but its behavior has worsened during the Trump administration.

“The Trump administration doesn’t have the same appreciation for human rights. And the Vietnamese Communist party knows that,” Adams said.

Whether Vietnam will reduce or eliminate Michael Nguyen’s sentence and deport him back to the United States depends largely on his role in the protests and on whether the United States is willing to back him aggressively, Adams said.

“His main hope is that he wasn’t involved in any violence, and that the United States, at the highest level, demands his release every day, over and over,” Adams said. “That’s how it works. And if that’s not happening, he doesn’t have a chance.”

Lowenthal and other lawmakers said they intend to do their part to make that happen.

“I don’t know what the outcome will be,” Lowenthal said. “But we’ll put pressure on.”