This article was originally published on HaRDstories.
From a rundown apartment room on Bangkok’s outskirts, a Vietnamese dissident on the run and his wife struggle to make a living to feed themselves and their three young children.
At 30, Song* takes any work he can find, mostly on construction sites. His wife leaves before dawn for the local market, gathering discarded vegetables from vendors for their family’s meals.
Despite these hardships, Song said returning to his home country is out of the question. His role in organising protests for a Christian minority community has made him a marked man in a country where dissidents routinely face arrests, imprisonment, or even threats of execution. As of 2022, by one count, Vietnam held at least 1,200 people on death row, while the actual number of executions remains a state secret.
“I was threatened and physically assaulted,” Song said through an interpreter, recounting his experience in Vietnam. “I fled to protect my family. I feel that we are safer in Thailand.”
The kingdom has emerged as a key refuge in Southeast Asia due to its relative stability and central location, drawing asylum seekers from Vietnam, Myanmar, and beyond. Despite never signing the U.N. Refugee Convention, Thailand has historically provided temporary sanctuary to those fleeing persecution.
But for Song, that sense of security rests on a shaky ground – a situation familiar to other refugees and displaced people who sought haven in Thailand.
Asylum seekers and political dissidents like Song are classified as “illegal aliens” by Thai immigration authorities, leaving them vulnerable to arrest and deportation. A recent court case, in which a Vietnamese activist fought his extradition order, highlighted these risks. According to news reports, Vietnamese agents crossed the border to monitor and intimidate their countrymen on Thai soil.
Their limbo in Thailand grew more uncertain after the U.S. government under President Donald Trump suspended refugee admissions and resettlement programmes, potentially prolonging their tenuous stay.
‘We don’t want to be a burden’
Among Song’s neighbours is Thi*, a 22-year-old restaurant manager who fled Vietnam with her family a decade ago. Her fluency in Vietnamese, English and Thai helped secure the job, but her only official documentation is a U.N. refugee agency card identifying her as an asylum seeker.
That card carries little weight with Thai authorities. Thailand has not ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention, leaving asylum seekers like Thi in a precarious position: hoping for resettlement while working unofficially, always at risk of detention.
“I’d rather stay here permanently,” said Thi, who has spent most of her life in Thailand.
While refugee children can attend Thai public schools – Thi completed high school here – their path to higher education is blocked by requirements for official identification papers.
To overcome these barriers to knowledge, several language and skill learning courses are set up by Vietnamese refugees in the hope that members of their community would have sufficient education to find decent work, instead of the usual menial jobs that most are forced to do.
In a small apartment in eastern Bangkok, Rose*, who fled religious persecution in Vietnam 12 years ago, teaches English to a group ranging from children to adults. On a recent evening, students crowded into her makeshift classroom, decorated with donated teaching materials from Thai NGOs and the Vietnamese community.
“We refugees don’t want to be a burden to Thai society,” said Rose, who learned English despite being barred from Thai universities. The language skills, she told HaRDstories, could prove crucial for those eventually resettled elsewhere.
Her students include working adults who have adapted to unexpected circumstances. “Many take jobs they never imagined doing,” Rose said. ” But they try to protect their rights by refusing to work in jobs that exploit them or suppress their wages.”
Occasionally, foreign volunteers join Rose’s classes, including August, a Swedish aid worker. “Everyone who comes here for the lesson is very enthusiastic,” he said. “They know that English is very important for their future.”
Members of the Vietnamese community in Thailand take part in an informal English language course held inside a small house. The evening class attracts Vietnamese refugees who want to resettle in a Western country. Photo: Peerapon Boonyakiat/HaRDstories
A history of sanctuary, a future uncertain
Long before modern borders, Thailand served as a refuge for Vietnamese fleeing strife in their homeland. In 17th-century Ayutthaya, historical records mention a “Cochin-Chinese village,” believed to have sheltered Vietnamese Christians escaping persecution.
The flow continued through the Vietnam War of the 1960s, when Thailand, a key U.S. ally, became both a launching pad for American bombing campaigns and a haven for those fleeing the conflict. Among the displaced were ethnic minorities like the Montagnards and Hmong.
The Hmong remain the most prevalent group of refugees seeking safety in Thailand today. Meanwhile, repression under Vietnam’s government also forces anti-government activists and ‘unrecognised’ religious groups to uproot their lives and head for Thailand, despite risks of arrest and diminishing chances of resettlement elsewhere.
“Refugees from Vietnam have very limited options,” said Nuchnalin Leerasantana from the Thailand Migration Reform Consortium, a migrant rights advocacy group. “Laos and Cambodia aren’t safe for refugees and asylum seekers. That’s why travelling to Thailand is the easiest solution. It’s the option that seemed to be the safest for them.”
This elusive promise of safety has become profitable for human smuggling networks. Song paid 100,000 baht (approximately 3,000 USD) to their agents for passage to Thailand – a three-day journey by car, boat and foot.
Before becoming a refugee, Song said, he campaigned for local Hmong children who were denied birth certificates due to their minority status and Christian faith. When officials moved to arrest him for his advocacy, he and his family fled their homeland in January 2024.
While HaRDstories was unable to independently verify Song’s account, rights groups have consistently documented Vietnam’s suppression of free expression, religious practices, and civil society, particularly targeting faith groups seen as threats to social order.
“Police monitor, harass, and sometimes violently crack down on religious groups operating outside government-controlled institutions,” states the Human Rights Watch’s 2023 report on Vietnam. “Unrecognized religious groups – including Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, Christian, and Buddhist groups – face constant surveillance, harassment, and intimidation. Followers of independent religious groups are subject to public criticism, forced renunciation of faith, detention, interrogation, torture, and imprisonment.”
By the Vietnamese government’s own estimate, about 140 religious groups with approximately 1 million followers remain “unrecognised” by authorities.
The U.S. historically maintained a robust programme helping ethnic and religious minorities, as well as political activists, from Vietnam resettle or join family members in America. But this lifeline came under fire in January when President Trump suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), directing authorities to admit refugees case by case.
A prominent Vietnamese immigration advocate in the U.S. told Benar News that the order “has the most direct and significant impact on refugees in general and on Vietnamese refugees in Thailand in particular,” affecting about 1,500 Vietnamese refugees in Thailand hoping for resettlement.
No safe place
Hao, an ethnic Hmong who has lived in Thailand for 13 years, speaks of a different era of religious persecution in Vietnam. Speaking in fluent Thai, he described converting to Protestantism at age nine, when his family left their animist traditions.
As a leader in his rural Hmong community, Hao led evangelical missions and organised fundraising for a local church – activities that drew unwanted attention from Vietnamese authorities.
“They told me Christianity was a Western import, that Americans were spreading this religion to incite war,” Hao said, recounting how security officers first tried to intimidate him, then issued a warrant for his arrest.
After the warrant for his arrest was issued, Hao said he left his hometown to another province in central Vietnam and carried on his missionary work. Upon the realisation that law enforcement officials were closing in on him, Hao and his family finally fled Vietnam for good, according to his account given to HaRDstories.
Hao maintained he had no regret in following the path that took him through the tribulation that led him to Thailand, citing his unmoved faith in Christianity.
“I want to keep doing what I do, because it’s what I believe in,” Hao said.
Today, Hao and his family await resettlement elsewhere. Their urgency to leave Thailand intensified after a 2018 incident when Vietnamese officials made an unexpected cross-border visit. “They showed up at my doorstep, accusing me of campaigning against the government,” he said.
Such incidents appear increasingly common. In March, Radio Free Asia reported that Thai police accompanied Vietnamese state agents to Montagnard homes in Thailand, pressuring residents to return to Vietnam. A month later, Vietnamese dissident Duong Van Thai vanished from Thailand, later reappearing in Vietnam with a 12-year prison sentence for “propaganda against the state.” His supporters believe Vietnamese security officers orchestrated his abduction.
Despite these risks and Thailand’s limited legal protections for refugees, Hao told HaRDstories that he was touched by the support, help, and goodwill many Thais have shown him since his arrival in the country. He agreed to share his story, he said, to help his Thai friends understand why Vietnamese seek refuge here.
“I always tell other Vietnamese [refugees] who arrived here that they have to take responsibility and clean up any mess they make. We should do whatever we can to contribute to the society here,” Hao said.
A Vietnamese-Hmong woman sews clothes and textiles to fulfill orders from customers during her exile in Thailand. Officially barred from employment, Vietnamese refugees often take up informal jobs in restaurants, construction sites, and the textile businesses to earn their living. Peerapon Boonyakiat/HaRDstories
A test for Thailand’s refugee protections
Though Thailand never signed the United Nations refugee convention, a recent law on torture and forced disappearances commits the country to non-refoulement – prohibiting the return of people to countries where they face serious threats.
But such a guardrail is constantly being tested, as illustrated by the government’s attempt to extradite Vietnamese dissident Y Quynh Bđăp to Vietnam per a request by the socialist government. The 32-year-old activist for religious freedom and the ethnic Montagnards has remained in Thai custody since June 2024. The Vietnamese government accused him of having links to a terror attack and sentenced Bđăp to ten years in prison in absentia.
A Thai court approved his deportation in September. Bđăp has appealed.
“Thailand is in an awkward position,” said Sriprapha Petcharamesree, a law professor at Chulalongkorn University who testified at Bđăp’s hearing. “They can’t extradite asylum seekers, but they can’t facilitate resettlement either, fearing strained relations with Vietnam.”
“Bđăp is not the only person wanted by the Vietnamese government. We have seen incidents where the Thai government permitted the Vietnamese police to walk into the community of Vietnamese refugees here in Thailand and tried to persuade them to return to Vietnam,” Sriprapha said.
Those visits, she said, seem to be designed to present the refugees with two choices: either leave on their own volition, or the Vietnamese authorities will secure them through other means like abduction or filing a legal request for extradition.
“Looking at the way Thailand is treating these refugees, it appears that their action is motivated by politics and concern for international relations rather than the letter of the law,” the lecturer told HaRDstories.
Deportation would violate not only Thailand’s non-refoulement law but several human rights treaties, including conventions against torture, Sriprapha said. The Immigration Bureau did not respond to requests for comment.
The National Human Rights Commission and United Nations special rapporteurs have urged Thailand not to deport Bđăp. “We believe that, if extradited, Y Quynh Bdap would be at risk of enforced disappearance and torture or other ill-treatment or punishment, in violation of non-refoulement,” U.N. experts wrote.
While his appeal could take up to a year, Bđăp remains in Bangkok Remand Prison. His lawyer, Nadthasiri Bergman, highlighted part of the verdict delivered in September which found Bđăp guilty of violating the Thai immigration law for entering the kingdom without proper documentation. About 40 other asylum seekers from Vietnam, including Bđăp’s wife, were also convicted of a similar offence in late February.
Nadthasiri said punishing asylum seekers for having to resort to illegal means of seeking safety in Thailand runs against international laws on refugees.
“Based on universal practices, refugees or asylum seekers should not be prosecuted for how they arrive,” the lawyer said. “When people run for their lives, they can’t always prepare correct papers in time.”
Salt of the earth
On a recent Sunday, about two hundred Vietnamese Christians gathered in a Bangkok Catholic church for their weekly Protestant service. The priest had offered them the space after they had outgrown their previous meeting place, a rented house.
Hao led the congregation as children and teenagers worshipped alongside adults, some in traditional Hmong dress. Among them was Song, father of three, playing in the band onstage.
“I chose Christianity because my life improved so much after discovering the faith,” Song said later in his small rented room. “Religion should be about personal choice, yet it became an excuse to persecute me.”
Behind his devotion lie constant worries, particularly for his children, ages six, three and one. Song takes whatever work he can find to pay for his eldest child’s schooling and attends English classes in the evening. “Education is the best thing I can give myself and my children,” he said.
But day labour barely covers expenses. Three months behind on rent, Song struggles while his wife cares for their younger children at home. He isn’t asking the Thai authorities for benefits, he stressed, just legal status and the chance to work properly.
“I’d like to tell the Thai government that every refugee who came here has been through so much persecution,” Song said. “We only want to stay here temporarily, and we only ask for the rights to find proper work, so that we can support ourselves and our family, so that we won’t become a burden to Thai society.”
As the clock struck 10 p.m., Song prepared to end the interview. He and his wife rise early – he to take their oldest to school, she to search the local market for discarded vegetables. They move cautiously, aware that any police encounter could mean trouble without proper identification.
In a parting word, Song reflected on the turn of fortune that reduced him – a man who once led a comfortable life as a coffee grower in Vietnam – to a near-jobless refugee without certain future or basic rights in Thailand. But ultimately, Song said, he always found relief in the knowledge that at least he and his family were safe.
“It’s both happiness and sadness mixed together,” Song said.
*Full names have been changed or withheld due to safety concerns for the sources.
Edited and Translated from Thai by Teeranai Charuvastra