This book won the 2025 Colorado Book Award for General Nonfiction.

Imagining Aliens

Thanks to the law that Coleman Blease pushed through Congress in 1929, sometimes crime finds migrants, turning the courageous act of leaving one home in search of another into a crucible. Other times, migrants find crime, freezing their lives at their worst moment, the details of that instance in the past becoming a ghost that haunts the future. For Wynnie Goodwin, the worst moment came on May 29, 1993. Passing by a restaurant in Orange County, California, she and a group of friends stopped when they saw some other kids they didn’t like. Things quickly worsened. Shouting started, a gun came out, shots were fired. Two girls ended up in the hospital.

“I unlawfully attempted to kill Nhung Luu and Saythong Thongprachanh with malice aforethought,” Wynnie wrote on the guilty-plea form she signed and submitted to the court. Twenty years later, she says it didn’t happen that way. “Absolutely not true,” she told me when I read the words back to her. “The way it’s written it’s like I planned and plotted the crime, which is not true. And that I did it with intent, which is not true.”

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She doesn’t deny that she wrote the sentence. She just says that her lawyer told her what to write. “I would not have come up with that language.” I believe her. Malice aforethought is a legal term that means the premeditated intent to harm or, worse, kill. This isn’t a phrase that rolls off the tongue, especially not a teenager’s. At the time, Wynnie was seventeen. She’d spent most of her life in coastal Louisiana, but in the summer of 1988 her family relocated to Orange County. There they moved in with her father’s older brother and his children.

That’s when things started getting bad. One cousin was older, another the same age. While the parents hustled to survive in Southern California, the kids got into trouble. The police say that Wynnie was in a gang. On the plea form, she agreed. Looking back on it, Wynnie says that’s overblown. “It was just a bunch of teenagers that had no positive influence,” she told me. “As children, we came together to be part of something because I didn’t fit in anywhere.”

There’s nothing unusual about Wynnie’s teenage years. Gangs certainly weren’t new to Southern California in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but they were becoming more common. More important than what was happening on the streets of Orange County was what was happening in Washington.

Wynnie’s teenage years coincided with a period when Republicans and Democrats were going after each other as being weak on crime. The year that Wynnie arrived in California, 1988, President Ronald Reagan announced “Crime Victims Week,” declaring “the responsibility for crime lies with those who commit them.” That fall, allies of Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, attacked the Democratic nominee for president, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, for his position on releasing prisoners.

Describing the stabbing and rape of a white couple by a convicted Black man, Willie Horton, who had received temporary release from a Massachusetts prison, Republicans orchestrated a brutal ad campaign, branding Dukakis’s position as dangerous. Launched by Lee Atwater, a political operative who got his start in politics as an aide to the unabashedly racist Strom Thurmond, South Carolina’s longtime senator, the TV spot added an unspoken racial element to the Democrat’s dangerousness: Black men were a threat to white people.

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Credited with carrying Bush to the presidency, the Willie Horton ad is a lesson in the power of the media to fan fears of crime. Over and over again, TV news broadcasts flashed menacing images of Horton—a mug shot, an image of him looming over cops, a scary close-up—often pairing them with photos of the white people he had attacked. California wasn’t immune to what was happening at the national level. That winter, the New York Times announced, “Gang Violence Shocks Los Angeles.” A year later, the Los Angeles Times reported a record-high number of gang murders even as the police said the number of homicides was down.

Democrats learned a lesson. Four years after the Willie Horton ad pushed Bush into the White House, the incumbent president’s Democratic opponent, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, was ready to take the offensive on crime. On the campaign trail, Clinton blasted Bush as weak on crime. “He’s talked a lot about drugs, but he hasn’t helped people on the front line to wage that war on drugs and crime. But I will,” Clinton promised as he accepted his party’s nomination for president.

After Clinton’s victory, his allies in Congress were ready to make good on that promise. Delaware senator Joe Biden stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1993 to bemoan young people “without any conscience developing.” Speaking the same year that Wynnie was arrested, Biden added, “We have predators on our streets.” 

Biden could’ve been talking about Wynnie. Gang or not, Wynnie and her friends were up to no good that night. Decades later, she doesn’t deny that. She was there, in the middle of the argument, when shots were fired and two people were hit. Fortunately, neither died. Cops tried to get her to snitch on her friends, but she refused. She was afraid that the other kids would go after her family. Besides, “that’s just something you didn’t do,” she told me.

Convicted of two counts of attempted murder, plus a sentencing boost for gang involvement, Wynnie got twelve years in the state prison system. She served six, with the first two-and-a-half at a juvenile detention facility. Wynnie had lived in the United States for all but the first month or so of her life, and the government knew it. In fact, she’d entered as a refugee. She was born in Vietnam just before her parents fled because of the war.

In those chaotic last days of the conflict, she didn’t so much leave Vietnam as she was taken out. She was a newborn carried onto her family’s fishing boat in her parents’ arms. The first place she saw in the United States—though she was too young to remember it—was Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, a major entry point for Vietnamese refugees in 1975.

Like Wynnie’s father, most of the people brought there had been involved with the defeated South Vietnamese military. Talking about whether she remembers the country of her birth doesn’t make much sense. She was so young when she left that it would have been impossible. Wynnie is a product of the United States, flaws and all. In the words of her criminal defense attorney, she’s “American through and through.” As a refugee, Wynnie had permission to stay in the United States for the rest of her life. She knew she was a permanent resident, not a U.S. citizen, but to a teenager that distinction doesn’t much matter.

To immigration law, that’s the only distinction that does matter. Permanent residency is the highest form of immigration status. It comes with the right to live and work in the United States indefinitely, but it’s not citizenship. And only U.S. citizens are protected from deportation.

With two attempted murder convictions on her record, Wynnie was deportable, and immigration officers knew where to find her: Valley State Prison in Chowchilla, California. Watching the people around her, she realized that wasn’t the future she wanted.

Passing the days in Chowchilla, she also knew she wouldn’t be free at the end of her time in state custody. Agents with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, predecessor of today’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, had already told her they’d pick her up. “That’s when I realized I’m in trouble,” she told me. She was afraid she’d be deported.

As promised, California prison officials handed Wynnie over to the INS. They took her to a county-owned immigration prison that she describes as “inhumane,” and she sat there for several months until the INS transferred her closer to the San Francisco immigration court where an immigration judge was considering the INS’s deportation case against her. In early 2000, the immigration judge agreed with the government, signing her deportation order. Wynnie should be sent back to the country where she had been born but had never known.

Only the INS couldn’t deport her. No country, not even the United States, can dump people in another country without that government’s permission. Since the mid-twentieth century, Cuba has been the most important example of a government that routinely refuses to accept its citizens whom the United States doesn’t want.

But there are others. China, India, Russia, and ten other countries all made it so difficult for the United States to deport their citizens that in 2020 the U.S. State Department declared them “recalcitrant” countries. Vietnam was at risk of non-compliance with U.S. deportation goals along with another sixteen countries, according to the State Department.

Two decades earlier, in 2000, when an immigration judge issued Wynnie’s deportation order, relations between the governments of the United States and Vietnam were still feeling the hangover of the U.S. invasion. Diplomatic relations had been restored in 1995, but the two countries didn’t have a deportation agreement through which the United States could deport the roughly 6,200 people like Wynnie who had been ordered deported despite having lived here for years.

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The war that drove Wynnie’s family out of Vietnam kept her away once more. The INS had nowhere to send her except home: Orange County. Returned to the community she knew best, she jumped off the troubled path she’d been on as a teenager and threw her energy into education. She wanted to become a lawyer, but she worried that she couldn’t get into law school with a serious felony record. She got her bachelor’s degree, then two master’s degrees instead. Now she oversees a thirty-person human resources department at a 2,000-person company. She’s married, raising four U.S. citizen kids, and keeps busy volunteering with survivors of domestic violence.

In the meantime, California changed its criminal laws, making it possible for a judge to revisit Wynnie’s convictions. Everyone thought she was eighteen when her friends attacked the other kids at the restaurant, but they were wrong. She was seventeen. No one caught this because her immigration documents listed her birthdate as January 1, 1975, which would’ve made her eighteen when the shooting happened in May 1993. Only she wasn’t born in January. Wynnie doesn’t know exactly when she was born, but in October of that year, a military doctor at Fort Chaffee wrote that she appeared to be one month old. This was “too young for shots,” a handwritten note on a medical exam record says.

For people like Wynnie who were born in the Vietnamese countryside, it wasn’t unusual not to know their exact birth date. Many were born at home without birth certificates. Plus, in the middle of a warzone there were other things occupying her parents’ attention. When they arrived in the United States, government officials often made things easier on themselves by picking the same birthdate: January 1. In reality, she was probably born in late June or early July of 1975.

 That means she wasn’t quite eighteen years old when her friend shot those kids, so she shouldn’t have been prosecuted as an adult. This was a fatal error, a judge concluded in December 2021, vacating her convictions—an odd legal term that just means a court wipes away old convictions. The following year, the immigration courts erased her deportation order and a few months later she took the citizenship oath. Forty-seven years after arriving in the United States, Wynnie Goodwin became a U.S. citizen.

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández is the Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and an immigration lawyer. He has appeared in the New York Times, CNN en Español, NPR, The Guardian, and many other venues. The author of ”Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants” as well as “Crimmigration Law,” he lives in Denver, Colorado. Learn more at ccgarciahernandez.com.