Judith A. Marty, Esq. is a mentor attorney for

National Center for Refugee and Immigrant Children
U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants
1717 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Suite 200
Washington, DC 20036

Unaccompanied minors are represented by pro bono attorneys under the guidance and advice of a mentor attorney. If a child needs assistance, please contact http://www.refugees.org/  to find out if you qualify for a free attorney.

A real life story follows. One person can make a difference.

The most vulnerable in the world need our help. Never forget the power and force of love and compassion. If we as a nation cannot treat children well, what kind of people are we?

This Boy's Life

He's three years old and HIV-positive. His mother's a prostitute and drug addict. Back in Thailand. Naturally, the INS is trying to deport him.

by Denise Hamilton, originally published July 6, 2000

Thai Airways flight 772 from Bangkok to Los Angeles was full on April 11, and no one paid special attention to the smartly dressed man, woman, and groggy child with the Singapore passports whose bags bulged with expensive toys.  If anyone did notice, they probably assumed the family was on vacation eager to show their son the marvels of Disneyland and Universal Studios.

The reality was much more sinister. U.S. and Thai officials say the man, Suseno Karjopranato, is a modern slave trader. The woman posing as his wife was actually Chu Mwei Long, 22,of Fujian, China, whom Karjopranato was bringing to the United States, probably to work in the underground brothels, that dot Southern California's suburbs.

As for the sleeping toddler in their arms, he was no cherished son but an impoverished child from northern Thailand who had been rented or sold to smugglers for about $275. Little Phanupong Khaisri was a mere prop, a human decoy who existed to round out the facade of a happy family. His slumbers weren’t due to jet lag. The toddler, whose story has been pieced together from interviews, court records, and other documents, is HIV-positive; he had been drugged with codeine to keep him numb and compliant during the long flight across the Pacific.

Upon the trio’s arrival at LAX, a U.S. Customs official noticed that their passport stamps looked suspicious. Under subsequent questioning by the INS, Karjopranato admitted he wasn’t the boy’s father, but rather a family friend who was taking the boy sightseeing. Eventually, Karjopranato confessed that he planned to enter the country illegally with Long, stay several days, then return to Thailand with the boy.

But INS agents, experts at detecting false documents and nabbing illegal immigrants, aren’t as well-versed in the burgeoning business of selling human beings into sexual slavery and servitude. The United Nations says such trafficking has ensnared 200 million people internationally and is the fastest growing criminal enterprise today. Unaware that they had stumbled across a sophisticated enterprise by an Asian crime syndicate to traffic humans, the INS arranged to deport the adults back to Thailand.

The boy posed a bigger problem. He was what the INS calls an “unaccompanied minor,” too young to tell authorities where he lived and to whom he belonged. Unlike Eliãn Gonzales, the Cuban boy in Miami to whom his case has been compared, Phanupong had no loving relatives waiting with open arms. In fact, the INS initially thought the boy, who they believed was two years old, had been kidnapped, and it would be days before they sorted out the truth.

During his INS interrogation, Karjopranato gave several phone numbers for the boy’s mother in Thailand. When immigration officials called the first one, a man answered and claimed he didn’t know anything about a woman or missing child.

The second number was a cell phone. It was 3:30 a.m. in Thailand when INS officials called. A woman answered, explaining that they had reached a nightclub in Chiang Rai, an impoverished rural province in northern Thailand near the Chinese border. One INS employee thought she heard men’s voices in the background, coaching the woman on her answers in Chinese-accented Thai. Yes, she was the boy’s mother, the woman said. Her name was Tabtim Kaewtaeng. Everything was all right. She had merely sent the boy sightseeing with Karjopranato.

“I was a bit worried about my son, but I saw that they got along well. Hence I allowed them to take a trip together,” Kaewtaeng later told The Nation, a Thai newspaper. She added that she never asked Karjopranato or her son where they went. She also refused to press charges against him.

How could she have sent a sick two-year-old child abroad without his family, the INS inquired.

“He wanted to (go), “Kaewtaeng responded. Because of his tender age., Phanupong posed a vexing challenge for the INS. Most unaccompanied minors that the agency apprehends are in their late teens, according to Leonard Kovensky, the agency’s associate district director for detention and deportation in Los Angeles. Federal law gives the INS 72 hours to find a parent, adult relative, or guardian willing to take a minor in. Failing that, the child is sent to one of the INS’s juvenile facilities throughout the country, which are run under contract, usually by nonprofit community or religious groups that try to place the child in foster care. In Los Angeles County, children are also sent to Los Padrinos, the county’s juvenile hail facility, where they are housed separately from the delinquents.

But Los Padrinos doesn’t accept children under 10. And Phanupong wasn’t even a child yet, he was a baby in diapers. So what to do? The INS initially considered sending him to its facility for minors in Chicago, but the boy appeared sick and needed medical attention. At this point, the INS hadn’t even confirmed his name or nationality. But based on what Karjopranato told them, the agency decided to call the Thai Consulate in Los Angeles.

Consular officials suggested that Phanupong could be sent back to Thailand in a few days once they confirmed his mother’s story. They offered to take custody of the boy. Then they, too, began looking for a temporary home for Phanupong.

It wouldn’t be easy. Most local shelters don’t take young children without parents. Neither does the Wat Thai Buddhist Temple in North Hollywood, sometimes rents hotel rooms for stranded Thais waiting to return to their homeland, but that clearly wouldn’t be appropriate for a two-year-old boy, said Thai Deputy Consul General Nuttavudh Photisaro.

So the consulate now called the Thai Community Development Center, a nonprofit group that helps struggling Thai immigrants in L.A. find housing, jobs, medical care, and education. The two groups had worked together before -- most notably in 1995, when 74 Thai women were discovered working and living in slavelike conditions at an El Monte sweatshop. The relationship between the consulate and the Thai center was fragile; they often clashed over how to handle cases that exposed the seamier side of Thai society. Still, the consulate also knew that the center got things done. Soon, Thai Consul Wasin Dhamavasi was explaining to center officials that a little boy, probably a Thai national, needed shelter for two days until he could be repatriated.

Despite their savvy. Thai Center workers had no better luck finding the child a place to stay. Determined not to turn the boy away, Center Executive Director Chanchanit “Chancee” Martorell called a meeting, and all eyes soon turned to Chutima Vucharatavintara.

Vucharatavintara is a 45-year-old Thai immigrant who teaches parenting classes at the center, but she’s more than just an educator. A very spiritual person, Vucharatavintara is friends with the Dalai Lama, whom she met while on a religious pilgrimage to Nepal. She also spent a year walking barefoot through the Thai countryside spreading the Buddha’s teachings and relying on villagers and temples for food and shelter.

While she loved the life of a religious mendicant. Vucharatavintara reentered the secular world and became a lawyer to fight for the rights of the uneducated poor. She married, had a child, divorced, and practiced law in Thailand until 1986, when she says she was threatened by Thai police for trying to expose corruption.

Fleeing the country, Vucharatavintara arrived penniless in L.A. with her young son, turning to Buddhist temples here for support. She became a Buddhist nun and joined the American Buddhist Congress. And she met Andrew Leigh Chalkley, a Buddhist monk who is British. Eventually, they gave up religious life, married, and had a child together. Now, they live modestly with their sons, ages 17 and nine, in Highland Park, where their small bungalow serves as an open house for Thais in trouble.

So the family got out the baby crib, collected some donated clothes, and prepared for the boy’s arrival. But the days passed and still no call came. Little Phanupong was too young and too sick to be aware of the efforts unfolding on his behalf. The INS officers who took him into custody on April 11 said he was suffering from a severe ear infection, chicken pox, and fever.

Unable to place him in one of its regular facilities, the INS decided to put Phanupong in a hotel room while they untangled his story. It was an American chain hotel near downtown L.A. said Thai consular officers, who were impressed by the luxurious setting when they visited the child. Thai and INS officials declined to name the hotel, saying that other detainees are also housed there.

“This involves organized crime. There is lots of money, lots of payments involved, so for security reasons, we don’t want to divulge the name of the hotel,” said Kovensky, who added that “everything we’ve done is for the kid’s best interest. That’s what is motivating our actions and that’s what is behind our policy in the first place.”

Still, the INS is a big bureaucracy, not a day-care provider. What the traumatized and sick Phanupong needed was foster care, with a surrogate mother in a home selling. What he got was a large, impersonal hotel room with an armed INS detention officer stationed in his room 24 hours a day.

Such officers are “not trained in regards to changing a diaper or giving a bottle, but there are juvenile guidelines that they have to follow,” Kovensky said. Because of the boy’s age, the INS solicited volunteers among its staff to feed and otherwise care for the boy.

INS officials won’t discuss details of Phanupong’s first days in the United States, but said they use a private security firm to guard people apprehended at the airport. In some cases, these guards transport detainees to hotels and guard them for a day or so until an INS detention officer arrives.

No one will say whether this is what happened to Phanupong, but what’s clear is that his health deteriorated further. On April 12, the boy was brought to Temple Medical Center, a downtown clinic with a cough, fever and vomiting.  He was treated and released. The INS brought him back April 13 and 14. By then he was vomiting continuously.

On April 15, Phanupong, now suffering from dehydration and acute gastroenteritis, was admitted to the emergency room of White Memorial Hospital east of downtown L.A. The INS reported that he had been vomiting for several days, had dry, cracked lips, and wouldn’t eat.

At the hospital, a uniformed INS guard accompanied the sick little boy to his room and stayed at his bedside. When the guard’s shift ended, another replaced him. INS officials said this is standard procedure for all detainees in their custody.

By the next morning, Phanupong was wide awake, crying inconsolably during a medical exam. Word went out among the hospital’s Thai nurses that an abandoned little Thai boy had washed up at their door, and they arranged to take turns caring for him.

On April 18, Thai consular officials visited the hospital and found the toddler subdued. He didn’t respond to their questions, and they couldn’t tell if it was due to fright, his age, or a language barrier, since there are two main dialects of Thai.

Slowly, Phanupong adjusted to his new environment. Although quiet, he ate well and used body language to explain what he wanted. He sang little songs in Thai and played with wagons, blocks, and cars in the hospital playroom. He liked to be cuddled and held. He bonded with whomever took care of him, 

exhibiting none of the fear of strangers shown by many two-year-olds. For some reason, he didn’t like looking in the mirror and cried whenever he caught a glimpse of himself

On April 20, his condition stable, Phanupong was discharged. But doctors warned that air travel was out of the question until his ear infection cleared up, which ruled out a swift deportation. A follow-up appointment was set for May 4.

The toddler spent the next five nights in the hotel. Some days he accompanied INS employees to work. At the end of the day, they dropped him off, and he spent the night with a rotating group of INS detention officers who were armed just in case someone should try to kidnap him.

Knowing nothing about this, Martorell wondered what had happened to the Thai child in need of shelter. (INS officials said they couldn’t release the boy until they confirmed his identity, which took several weeks.) Finally, on April 24, the Thai consulate called, saying the boy would be ready the following day. So Vucharatavintara drove over to INS headquarters with Hae Jung Cho, project director of the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, a nonprofit group based in LiiIle Tokyo that works closely with the Thai Community Development Center.

They found the boy in the arms of a Thai-­speaking INS employee, eating from a small bowl office. Then the INS briefed the two women on Phanupong’s early life.

According to court documents, his mother,  Tabtim Kaewtaeng, was a 22- year-old prostitute and drug addict who had been sold into sexual slavery at age 12 by her aunt. The boy’s father was dead. He had committed suicide after learning he was HIV-positive when the child was four months old.

After her husband’s death, Kaewtaeng moved to Bangkok and married an ethnic Chinese man named Ma Chao Yong with Singaporean papers who Thai authorities believe is involved in trafficking human beings. The boy’s mother left Phanupong, whom she nicknamed “Got” after a Thai child actor and singing idol, to be raised by his maternal grandparents.

But Got’s life was starkly different than that of his pampered celebrity namesake. His grandparents, Tongkham and Tan Kaewtaengian, were in their 60s and lived in Chiang Rai in mountainous northern Thailand. An INS staffer told Cho that Chinese traffickers are active in the area and that many children are smuggled from Chiang Rai to the Middle East for sexual exploitation.

Got’s grandparents, who depended on their daughter’s earnings as a prostitute, told a Thai newspaper that their daughter would take the child away for weeks at a time. In March, Kaewtaeng picked her son up from his grandparents’ house along with his birth certificate. Got’s grandparents told Thai police she intended to sell the boy.

Thai authorities have confirmed that Kaewtaeng sold or rented Got to a trafficking ring for 10,000 bhat, or approximately $275. The boy’s passport showed two previous trips to Japan and one to the United States. Kaewtaeng told the INS that her son had a birthmark on his groin, so Vucharatavintara, Cho, and the INS officers undid Got’s diaper and peered in. There was no birthmark. But his photo matched up, and INS felt confident they had identified the child. So Vucharatavintara signed the paperwork to take him to her Highland Park home, agreeing to bring him back May 4, when the INS planned to deport him if doctors deemed him fit to travel.

When she put out her arms to the boy, Got came immediately, showing no fear and even waving goodbye to INS employees. He was a small, frail child with sparse black hair who weighed only 23 pounds. Based on his size and development, doctors initially thought Got was two. Later they learned he turned three on June 19.

Got put one arm around Vucharatavintara’s neck and pointed urgently at the door and window, as if he wanted to go outside. He still does this today, and some surmise he may have been confined inside for long periods of time.

Once at his surrogate mother’s home, Got played happily. Vucharatavintara made Thai noodles and the boy ate ravenously, polishing off three small bowls plus two pieces of chocolate cake. She noticed that all of his baby teeth were rolled.

“He was always pointing to Coke and candy, as if that’s what he was used to eating; he didn’t want milk or juice,” Vucharatavintara said.

Trouble started when she put him to bed. Got fell asleep, but woke up screaming. “He wouldn’t let me touch him. He was pulling my hair, trying to hit me, screaming, Vucharatavintara recalled.

She picked up the hysterical toddler and soothed him. “I held him. I carried him, walking around the living room. He’d fall asleep, then he’d wake up screaming five or six times.”

The next morning, she took him to a Thai psychologist she knew. After examining him, the psychologist said Got appeared to suffer from traumatic stress and was too insecure and fearful to play. He kept looking around for his new surrogate mother, clung to her, and tried to follow her when she left the room.

Got also spat out medicine the doctors had ordered, so Vucharatavintara resorted to squirting it on a piece of cake, which he promptly gobbled up. She brought the boy to work with her and he sat in her lap, afraid of her colleagues. “Hold me,” he told her in Thai.

At night, Vucharatavintara slept on the floor next to Got’s crib so she could soothe him when he woke. Slowly, the nightmares eased. Got still wakes up several times nightly but now whimpers instead of screaming. She calms him by singing a Thai lullaby cobbled from songs she crooned to her own children and a Thai melody she overheard the boy singing to himself. Even though they speak different dialects, Vucharatavintara said they understand each other just fine. He calls her Pha, which means auntie.

But caring for the sick, skittish child caused friction in Vucharatavintara’s own family and left her torn. She was exhausted from being up with the boy at night and working all day. Her nine ­year-old was displaced as the family’s baby. “I told my family, “We have to sacrifice our time in our home to save this boy’s life. We must treat him with love and compassion,”’ she said. “My children have everything -- a home, food, a mother, and a father. This boy has nothing.”

Despite ample evidence that Got is thriving with Vucharatavintara, the INS has tried to impugn her care, asking a federal judge -- so far unsuccessfully -- to remove the boy from the only safe haven he has known since arriving in the United States. Assistant U.S. Attorney Janna Sidel complained that Vucharatavintara doesn’t speak his dialect and charged that she once neglected to give him a prescribed medication.

Vucharatavintara said the allegation is nonsense. At press conferences describing the boy’s ordeal, she often breaks into tears and it’s clear she’s bonded closely with her young charge. But while Vucharatavintara knows this is necessary for his well-being, she worries it will make their ultimate parting that much harder.

“It’s not good,” she said softly. “He’s attached to me, but he must go home to his family.”After learning the ghastly details of Got’s past from the INS, Vucharatavintara and Cho met with Martorell to discuss their concerns.

The women agreed it would be unconscionable to send the boy back to the mother who had farmed him out to traffickers. Instead, they wanted to try to find a relative in Thailand who could take Got in, Nuttavudh Photisaro, deputy consul for the Thai consulate, had explained that the boy would be sent to an orphanage if he couldn’t be reunited with his family.

“We were quite concerned,” recalled Cho. “We still didn’t know if the woman claiming to be his mother really was. We worried about him falling back into the hands of smugglers.

Cho’s concern increased when she learned that Got’s mother had given the Thai government several hundred dollars to reimburse them for the boy’s airfare home. She knew average Thais didn’t have that kind of money and feared it came from the people to whom the boy had been sold or rented.

By April 27, Martorcll had written to Thomas Schiltgen, the INS district director in L.A., expressing her concerns. She also began appealing to the Thai consulate to locate other relatives. Instead, Martorell said Thai Consul General Piyawat

Niyom-rerks told her, “Let’s give the mother the benefit of the doubt.”

In an interview at the Thai consulate on Larchmont Boulevard, in his elegantly appointed office hung with portraits of Thai royals King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit, Niyom-rerks elaborated:

“At the time, I didn’t have any information about the context. Maybe she sold him [under duress]. But if you’re the mother of this child, and you’re under great media scrutiny, would you dare to exploit him again? I think not.”

As Got’s expected deportation date neared with no resolution, relations between the Thai consulate, the INS, and the Thai Center deteriorated. When the consulate couldn’t reach Vucharatavintara for two days during a brief vacation, they worried she might be hiding the boy.

As for Got’s advocates, they feared the INS would stage an Eliãn Gonzales-style raid to get the boy back and deport him before publicity grew. But that fear was groundless -- the agency planned to wait until May 4. Then, when doctors gave them the green light, they planned to drive the boy directly from the hospital to the airport, where the Thai Consulate had booked Got on that afternoon’s Thai Airways flight to Bangkok. The boy would be accompanied by a Thai stewardess who spoke his northern dialect and Michelle O’Brien, the INS officer in charge of juveniles who had overseen his custody in the U.S. Have a great trip, read Got’s preprinted ticket.

On May 3, a frantic Martorell called a press conference to explain the dangers Got faced at home and to denounce the INS for refusing to postpone the deportation.

Fifteen minutes before it began, Schiltgen called her, demanding to know why he hadn’t been told about it and vowing to send INS officials to explain their side of the story. Postpone the boy’s departure for humanitarian reasons and you’ll look like a hero, Martorell responded. Schiltgen said he’d see what he could do. Within moments, he called back.

You’ve got another week or so, Schiltgen told her. He refused to give Martorell a specific date, which did little to allay her qualms.

The next day, Martorell wrote to the Thai Public Welfare Department, saying the case required a detail plan to ensure Got’s safety back home. She, Cho, and Peter A. Schey, president of the L.A. -based Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, who was providing legal advice on the case, also began calling and faxing INS Commissioner Doris Meissner, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, and Assistant Attorney General Bill Lann Lee, who heads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

That same day, Vucharatavintara took Got back to White Memorial for his checkup. Still worried that the INS might whisk him to the airport if his ears had improved, Vucharatavintara scribbled out a note explaining who Got was, the trauma he had endured, and her own phone number and address, requesting that his future caretaker in Thailand let her know how the toddler was doing. When she stuck the note in his bag, it felt like shoving a message in a bottle and setting it adrift at sea.

But to everyone’s surprise, the follow-up exam revealed that Got was much worse. Dr. John F. Vanore said the boy needed surgery to drain fluid in his ears. After INS officials took Vanore aside for a private talk, the doctor announced that the boy would have the operation that day.

There was no time to waste, the doctor told Vucharatavintara. The INS planned to deport Got on May 9 and his ears needed a few days to heal. But the INS hadn’t reckoned with the ferocity of Chancee Martorell. Born in Bangkok, the 32-year-old Martorell and her parents arrived here with nothing when she was eight. To make ends meet, her mother cleaned homes and her father worked in the garment industry, drove a taxi. ran a small grocery store, and waited tables at the Los Angeles Country Club.

“I saw firsthand how they struggled,” recalls Martorell, “and that’s what has compelled me to work on behalf of immigrants.”

While earning a B.A. in political science from UCLA, Martorell flirted with the idea of returning to Thailand to help its poor, but a semester abroad at Chiang Mai University cured her of the notion -- she was too young, too female, and too working class ever to be accepted in rigidly class-bound Thailand.

Instead, she went to work for former Democratic Congressman Mel Levine of West L.A., doing constituent outreach. But she quickly grew disillusioned with politics here, too, realizing that local Thais needed better housing, jobs, and education before they could become empowered enough to join the political process.

So Martorell returned to UCLA and earned a master’s degree in urban planning, focusing on Third World development. Then she began doing volunteer work with the local Thai community.

Up to 80,000 Thais call Southern California home, and their numbers are growing. East Hollywood is the historic port of entry, but Thais also live along Interstate 10 in the San Gabriel Valley and cluster in the communities surrounding North Hollywood. where a large Thai temple was built in 1996.

Martorell said many of the region’s Thais are new immigrants who arrive with few or no job skills and a grade-school education. A smaller number be more educated and affluent, forming their own social networks with few connections to new immigrants.

When the L.A. riots hit in 1992, destroying many Thai businesses as well as Korean ones, Martorell lobbied for $10,000 from the Southern California Edison Co. to assess her community’s needs.

Then came the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which devastated the homes and businesses of many Thais. Martorell contacted then Governor Pete Wilson’s office and the Federal Emergency Management Agency and got a tent set up at the Thai temple in North Hollywood to provide housing and business assistance.

It was then that Martorell and several colleagues launched the Thai Communily Development Center with funding from groups such as the California Endowment and the Atlas Family Foundation. That first year, the Thai Center had three employees and an $80,000 budget.

Then in 1995 came the discovery of the Thai sweatshop in El Monte. Thai Center officials immediately became advocates for the women, translating for them, finding them jobs and places to live while they waited to testify against their oppressors, all the while applying pressure to see that the women received justice and compensation. For her troubles, Marlorell said she received threats from Thais angry at her airing of their nation’s dirty laundry, since the women’s captors had been Thai, too. But the case put her on the map and funds rolled in. Six years later, the Thai Center has grown to nine employees and has a $400,000 annual budget.

But Martorell said it has been an uphill battle, since many local Thais are loath to accept leadership from a young, working-class woman like herself.

“Thai society is still a very rigid and hierarchical,” she explained. “It’s based on gender, wealth, class, and education. There’s an informal caste system and a lot of times wealthy Thais don’t want to have anything to do with lower ones.

Many conservative Thai immigrants see the case as a litmus test of Thai sovereignty and want the boy sent back. Some Thai leaders even circulated a petition to get Martorell to disengage herself from the boy. They didn’t appreciate Martorell humiliating their homeland, reminding the world of Thailand’s reputation as the brothel of Asia, where human life is worth so little and Thai people so desperate they’d sell a child for $275.

Arkadet Sripipat, owner and editor of Siam Media, the biggest and oldest of the 15 Thai- language newspapers in L.A. County, said the debate over Got has polarized the Thai community and created controversy among its leaders. After following the story closely for several weeks, the paper’s owner scaled back coverage because “I don’t want to foment conflict.”

While Siam Media hasn’t taken an official position, Sripipat believes the boy should be sent back to his grandparents.

"Thailand is not a poor country, they can take care of all the people, " he said. "If you're poor, you can go to a hospital and get free medical care. I understand that the Thai CDC thinks the Thai government can’t take care of the boy and fears he might go back to smugglers, and that’s a good point. But after dealing with the Thai government for a long time, I understand the Thai government much better than Thai CDC and I know the Thai government will take care of him.”

In Thailand, Got has become a cause célêbre, “the Thai [han.” Thai newspapers are full of editorials urging his return, saying how lonely he must feel in America, a land of strangers.

As Deputy Thai Foreign Secretary Noppadol Pattama recently told the Thai newspaper The Nation: “This case is concerned with national prestige. It is important for Thailand to show the world it is capable of providing for the safety and welfare of one of its children.”

Martorell said some Thais have “totally misperceived” her intent. “We don’t want custody of the child,” she said. “Our position has always been to repatriate the child, but under safe conditions.”

But Martorell’s outspoken advocacy threatens to torpedo her already frail relationship with the Thai Consulate.

“Everything the Thai government has done has been politically motivated to save face and not look at the interests of the child,” said Martorell, who has a two-year-old child of her own. “Even after they learned the mother had rented him, they still wouldn’t demand that she give up custody. At every turn, we proposed things specifically to them; they didn’t want to take action.  For them, it’s all about protecting this image of Thailand instead of getting to the root of these evils.”

Thai Consul General Niyom-rerks responded that the boy was under INS jurisdiction and that the consulate’s hands were tied.

“I don’t know what more active role I can play,” Niyom-rerks said. “My presence here is to comply with U.S. laws and regulations. If the Thai [Center] can do otherwis., it has to be through their own channels. But there are no politics involved here. It’s not a matter of Thai national pride, it’s a mailer of a child’s human rights. “Got’s predicament illustrates the sinister underbelly of the new global economy at the dawn of the 21st century, a flourishing slave trade that doesn’t only occur in far-off Thailand or Sudan but right here in L.A. as well. Pino Arlacchi, director general of the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, pointed out last month that, while 11.5 million Africans were kidnapped and sold during 400 years of slavery, more than 30 million women and children may have been trafficked in and from Southeast Asia in the last decade alone for sexual exploitation and servitude. In addition, more than 50,000 people were brought into the United States for the same purposes, according to another U.N. report.

But authorities usually stumble across these cases only by chance, and then the suspects are often deported instead of investigated. Even when charges are filed, there are problems.

“A lot of the victims are too scared to testify against their exploiters," said Cho of the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking. “And a lot of [U.S. governmentj officers or agents don’t feel it’s worth their time or resources. But it’s a matter of training. These are issues that really need to be addressed by INS and the Department of Justice.”

Cho said Got offers a case study in government bungling. After questioning the two adults who brought him to America, the INS referred the case to the U.S. Attorney’s office in L.A., which opened a criminal investigation of Karjopranato, said U.S. Attorney spokesman Thorn Mrozek. But the investigation was halted within 72 hours when federal prosecutors learned the INS had deported the couple. Mrozek declined to comment on whether the INS should have waited until the U.S. Attorney’s probe was complete. The INS refused to comment at all.

But critics said this illustrates how federal agencies often work at cross-purposes, allowing suspected traffickers to slip through the cracks. Once back in Thailand, the two adults were charged with immigration violations. The woman promptly posted bail and disappeared. The man was sentenced to a suspended jail term and deported to Indonesia on April 26. He also dropped from sight.

Thai officials launched an investigation to determine how the man, woman, and Got could have been allowed out of their country with fake papers. But it wasn’t an isolated occurrence: Thai newspapers report that 20 immigration officers have been investigated for irregularities since January.

----

Now, consular officials hope the publicity surrounding Got’s plight will lead to general reform back home.

“This child has done a tremendous good for Thailand, because he’s focused attention on the problem of trafficking and now maybe we’ll pay more attention to it,” said Wasin Dhamavasi of the Thai Consulate. “An investigation has to be made, not only in this case but others as well.”Around May 6, Thai officials learned that Got also had paternal grandparents in Chiang Rai. Sumalee and Banlue Khaisri were in their mid-50s and lived five miles from the boy’s mother before she moved to Bangkok. By Thai standards, Banlue Khaisri, a retired provincial health officer with a 20,000 bhat monthly pension, was well-off, especially compared to the boy’s maternal grandparents.

It remains unclear exactly what role these grandparents played in Got’s life. The couple’s attorney, Dorothea P. Kraeger of Phoenix, did not return phone calls requesting an interview. Thai consular officials said the grandparents visited Phanupong regularly and provided money for his upkeep. But Martorell said that the grandparents knew the boy only slightly.

These grandparents began to talk about adopting the boy. Banlue lKlhaisri told Thai reporters that his grandson could live in an orphanage until his physical and emotional condition improved. At the same time, the grandparents told Martorell they wanted whatever was best for the child.

“They were happy the boy was in our care and said that if he was seriously ill, he should stay here where he could get the best medical treatment,” Martorell recalled.

While pleased by this hopeful development, Got’s advocates urged the Thai Social Welfare Department to determine the grandparents’ financial, physical, and emotional fitness to care for such a young, sick child. They also wanted a child psychologist to draw up a transition plan to minimize Got’s trauma at being uprooted from Vucharatavintara.

Meanwhile, the boy still suffered intermillent fevers and a nasty cough. Vucharatavintara, who had two children of her own and worked closely with infants in her parenting class, began to wonder whether the boy had tuberculosis or some other contagious disease that she might catch and pass on.

She grew even more concerned after learning that Got’s father had been HIV-positive and that Got had often been sick as a baby. According to Thai press accounts, Banlue Khaisri had taken his grandson for HIV tests when he turned one and again at age two. While the results were negative., the boy had to be tested every year until age seven.

So Vucharatavintara decided to take Got to her own doctor.

On May 8, with Got scheduled for deportation the following day, Vucharatavintara learned some terrible news. Got was ill with a life-threatening disease and needed long-term medical treatment. The Thai Center won’t name the illness, but consular officials said he is HIV-positive. “It’s an open secret,” said Deputy Consul General Photisaro.

Around six that evening, Peter Schey summoned everyone to his house in the Miracle Mile district for an emergency, all-night legal session. With the clock ticking, he, Martorell, Vucharatavintara., and Charles Song, an attorney in Schey’s office, began drafting the documents they hoped would stop Got’s deportation.

Their lawsuit asked a federal judge for more time to sort out the boy’s future. They also prepared an application for political asylum on Got’s behalf. The boy’s advocates knew they were out on a legal limb.

“It’s kind of a gray area,” admitted Cho. “An adult can tell an INS agent, “I’m afraid to go back home,’ but for a child who can’t tell us his story, who’s supposed to file? Now that [the INS has identified] the grandparents, they’re going to say we don’t have right to speak for the child. But we don’t think that should happen until they’ve been assessed. It is the INS’s duty to make sure children’s human rights are not breached. Children have the right to file for asylum.

As Got dozed feverishly on a mattress in Schey’s living room, the adults took turns reading documents to the lawyer as he drafted the 300-page legal complaint.

At 2 a.m., they realized they needed passport pictures for the asylum application, but every photo shop in town was closed. Vucharatavintara’s husband began leafing through a scrapbook they had assembled of the little boy and found several to cut down to size.

Meanwhile, Schey finished drafting the lawsuit, which alleged that the INS “unlawfully and unconstitutionally seeks to remove Phanupong from the U.S. in violation of his rights -- the due process and equal protection guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.”

Schey pointed out that the father of Eliãn Gonzales underwent rigorous and lengthy INS interviews to assess his fitness as a parent. It was therefore a double standard, Schey alleged, to send Got back quickly without determining the fitness of his relatives. Schey claimed the U.S. wanted to avoid embarrassing its ally, Thailand, for its “involvement in or inability or unwillingness to curb widespread and illicit trafficking in women and children.

Vowed Schey: “We will fight as long as it takes to make sure he’s safe.”

At 6 a.m., the group rushed everything to Kinko’s for copies. Greg Simons of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles delivered the asylum application to the INS. He gave it to District Director Schiltgen’s secretary, who walked it into her boss’s office. “Damn it,” Simons heard Schiltgen scream angrily as he read the document. “what do they think they’re doing?” (The INS denied Simons’ account.)

The case landed in the lap of U.S. District Court Judge Dickran Tevrizian. At 2:30 p.m. on May 9, the time Got was scheduled to board his plane for deportation, Tevrizian summoned everyone to his courtroom for an unscheduled hearing.

In a surprise decision that brought tears to the eyes of Got’s advocates, Tevrizian granted a temporary restraining order against deportation, quoting from the famous Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

“If I let this child go back to Thailand without making sure what’s in the best interests of that child, we’re guilty of false advertising in this country because we proudly display this to the whole world,” Tevrizian declared in an impassioned speech from the bench.

The judge also made it clear that he had taken a personal interest in the abused child.

“One of the criticisms of a judicial system is that we're so impersonal, and this is one where you’ve got to stop and look and find out, investigate. I can’t, as a parent, just summarily return this child back to Thailand, after what this child has been through,” he said.

“The whole thing stinks.”The following week, the Thai Social Welfare Department appointed Got’s paternal grandparents as his foster parents and Cho applied for a visa so the couple could come to the U.S. They arrived four days later and went to Schey’s home to see Got. But the boy didn’t recognize his relatives and started crying, refusing to go to them until Vucharatavintara urged him to walk over and say hello.

“He looked at me like, “Are you sure?’ I said, “Yes, they love you. Go to them.’ He did, but he kept looking back at me, following me around the house,” she recalled.

The Khaisris moved into a nurses’ dormitory behind White Memorial Hospital, quarters that had been arranged by a Thai church. A local restaurant, Thai Daily, generously provides all their meals free. At a recent court appearance, the grandparents seemed overwhelmed and anxious. They speak no English. They are thin, slightly stooped and look older than their years.

Once in America, Got’s grandparents began to express a different outlook on his medical treatment. Schey said they told him Got should come home to “die in the arms of his mother.”

“I do believe they love this child, but love does not always equate to doing what’s in the child’s best interest,” Schey said. “The paternal grandparents are under a lot of pressure from the Thai government to take the child home and resolve this whole matter.”

The consulate denied this. But Schey also wonders who will pay for Got’s care in Thailand -

- his medicine alone runs $1,000 per month. (Medi-Cal has been paying that tab here.) The Thai government initially said the boy’s family would have to bear the cost, but later agreed to foot the bill. Still, Schey wants to make sure.

“This is a very, very tragic situation,” the attorney explained. “He’s receiving lifesaving medical treatment in this country that’s not available in Thailand. Had the Thai Community Center not intervened in this case, I don’t think this child would have lived for more than a year.

Martorell also worries about Got’s future care if he’s sent back to Thailand. His medical treatment should be overseen by a specialist, she said, but the provincial hospital in Chiang Rai provides only basic services and doesn’t offer specialized treatment that AIDS patients often require. Got currently takes eight different medications that can cause side effects and adverse reactions. When that happens, the boy has to be hospitalized so doctors can adjust dosages or try new medications. If the boy’s body rejects all available drugs and he takes a turn for the worse, hospice care may eventually be needed.

“That’s a big question mark, determining what type of treatment is available in Chiang Rai and whether there will be a physician put in charge of his care,” Martorell said.

She is also concerned about how Got will be treated socially. “Unfortunately, in the small village where he is from, there is much ignorance about transmission (of HIV). Infected children are totally ostracized, and he probably won’t have the same opportunity as other kids to go to school and do all the other normal things. Parents won’t want him near their kids.”

Judge Tevrizian is expected to rule on the case July 17. If he grants the permanent injunction sought by Got’s advocates, the INS probably won’t be able to deport the boy until the federal lawsuit is resolved. However, Got’s paternal grandparents have filed papers asking Tevrizian to dismiss the suit. If Tevrizian does so, Got could be deported to Thailand at any time after that.

However, either side can appeal. If Got is ordered sent back and his advocates appeal, they would probably ask the court to let the boy stay in the U.S. until the case is resolved, which could take years.

If Got remains here, it’s unclear what will become of him. Vucharatavintara isn’t able to assume permanent guardianship over the boy, given his precarious health as well as her own family responsibilities and limited finances. Martorell said the Thai Center, which has spent thousands of dollars caring for Got, has begun to look for foster and adoptive parents who might want to take in a child with such a grave illness. The center, she said, has had inquiries from families interested in adopting the boy, but that was before anyone knew he was HIV-positive. One recent morning, Got played at his Highland Park home like a typical toddler. He tossed balls. He ran outside. He jumped up on Vucharatavintara’s toolbox, grabbed a cord he pretended was a microphone, and belted out a Thai song. karaoke­style. But when a stranger arrived, the little boy -- wearing denim overalls and a polo shirt donated by the Thai Center -- immediately ran to Vucharatavintara and eyed the visitor warily. Leaning into her for protection, he put his frail hand on her knee and left it there for most of the visit.

Vucharatavintara brings Got to work with her each morning, then drops him off around 11 a.m. to visit with his grandparents at the Halifax Apartments in Hollywood, a 46-unit low-income housing complex that the Thai Center owns. It has a garden and playground where they spend time getting reacquainted.

When Vucharatavintara picks Got up at 5 p.m., the boy screams with joy. And when they pull up to her front door, he points proudly and says, “Got’s house.”

“No, my house,” she corrects him, pointing to herself.

She’s been told such frank talk may hurt Got’s feelings, but the ex-Buddhist nun believes the boy should know the truth so it comes as less of a shock when they have to part.

“I always tell him, “You’ll go back to Thailand,’” Vucharatavintara said. “He asks if I’ll come, too, and I tell him, “No, just you and your family.’ Then he shakes his head and says he doesn’t want to go; he wants to stay with me.

“And I tell him, “No, I cannot take care of you forever. ‘

Reprinted by permission.  Learn more about the writer, Denise Hamilton at:  http://www.denisehamilton.com