He fled Cambodia. Now reporter fears Trump will send him back to his death

In 2017 Vuthy Tha left Cambodia by crossing into Thailand on foot.

- Fred Harter

Two of his colleagues at Radio Free Asia (RFA), a nonprofit news service funded by the US government, had been arrested. When plainclothes police came sniffing around his family home, asking for his whereabouts, he feared he would be next.

In the middle of the night Vuthy grabbed his laptop, dictaphone and passport and made his way to the border. For the next seven years he lived as a refugee in Bangkok and continued to work for RFA, covering crackdowns on opposition parties and concerns about election rigging back home in Cambodia.

Even in Thailand Vuthy did not feel safe. While he was there, several Cambodian journalists and activists were rounded up and sent back home. “I was constantly worried,” says Vuthy.

Last year his limbo finally came to an end when RFA, where he is now a video editor and news presenter, brought him to the US on an HB-1 visa, which allows organisations to hire employees in the US for speciality roles.

Now Vuthy’s life has again been thrown into uncertainty after Donald Trump signed an executive order gutting the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the federally funded service that runs Radio Free Asia, Voice of America (VOA) and several other outlets.