They fled their home countries to report from the safety of the U.S. Now, they fear they're in danger
Radio Free Asia journalists could be deported as Trump targets democracy-promoting programs
An ongoing U.S. retreat from defending liberal democracy has left some allies in danger of being exposed, stranded on a metaphorical battlefield.
Under U.S. President Donald Trump's hard-nosed foreign policy, unapologetically based on profit, not principle, multiple democracy-promotion tools are being dismantled.
This includes Radio Free Asia (RFA), which is being defunded. Created in the aftermath of China's 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, it reports in nine Asian languages, using web sites, social media and short-wave radio to get news to audiences with limited access to uncensored media.
With most of its U.S.-based staff laid off, some RFA employees who report from the safety of Washington. D.C., now risk losing not only their jobs but also their work visas and could face deportation to an uncertain future in their homelands.
Hour Hum is one of them. He fled Cambodia in 2017 after some of his colleagues were arrested and RFA had to shutter its office. He went into hiding in Thailand.
After seven years, he finally got a work visa and came to the U.S. with his wife. He likened it to reaching heaven after years in hell.
Now, with a one-month-old to care for, he's clinging to his job as layoffs sweep across the newsroom. His wife is feeling anxious again as she did during those years in hiding, Hum said, fearing deportation.
"If they don't kill me, they'll put me in jail," he said of his prospects in Cambodia, where reporters are routinely arrested and international organizations say independent journalism is increasingly impossible to do.
"It's almost the same thing."
Part of wider cuts
The defunding of RFA comes amid a wave of similar cuts to foreign initiatives, including the complete abolition of the U.S. international-aid agency.
The Trump administration sent a letter in March announcing that RFA's funding, $60 million US a year, was terminated.
It was part of the same executive order that ended financial support for the main Canada think-tank in Washington and other U.S. government-funded news outlets, including Voice of America.
Almost 90 per cent of U.S.-based RFA staff – nearly 400 people – have been laid off, and it's not yet clear how many of those layoffs will be permanent. Several dozen remain employed, as funding is still arriving in irregular spurts while the organization fights the cuts in court, arguing the president illegally undid funding already approved by Congress.
Staff deemed most at-risk in their home countries are being kept on as long as possible while some money is still available. Some have opened asylum claims.
'It's what keeps me up at night'
In her office, in a nearly empty bureau in Washington, RFA president Bay Fang recounted one anecdote after another of staff arrested over the years, along with some of their friends and relatives. In North Korea, a soldier was jailed in 2020 for just listening to RFA.
"It's heartbreaking. It's what keeps me up at night," Fang said. "[They're] thrown in jail because of their reporting.…
"Throughout it all, they wanted to keep going. They felt like it was their calling to actually let the world know what was happening in their country. The fact that now it could be the U.S. government silencing them is just heartbreaking."
How RFA angered autocrats
In the years since it was created in 1996, RFA's reporters have broken stories on camps in China for the Muslim Uyghur minority. They did early reporting on a strange new virus ripping through central China in 2020, getting tips from sources inside the country being arrested for speaking about COVID-19.
They called up crematoriums in Wuhan and heard about staggering numbers of bodies and funeral homes publishing jobs ads seeking overnight staff.
They broke stories about Chinese-controlled police stations within North America and intimidation of diaspora communities.
In Myanmar, a villager found a phone with evidence of soldiers bragging about committing war crimes, with photos and evidence of throats being slit and decapitations. He got the phone to Radio Free Asia, which broke that story.
So it's no surprise that reaction to the demise of RFA has been buoyant in some of those countries.
In China, the government-affiliated Global Times called RFA and other U.S.-funded news operations a relic of Cold War ideological propaganda and welcomed its entry into the dustbin of history.
"The so-called beacon of freedom," it wrote, referring specifically to Voice of America, "has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag."
There was a celebratory Facebook post from Cambodia's longtime leader, Hun Sen, accused of rampant corruption and the killing and jailing of political opponents.
He applauded Trump for leading the world in combating what Sun called the scourge of fake news.
And as the U.S. pulls back on funding news, China and Russia are expanding their footprint, with state-run outlets like RT and CGTN opening dozens of stations and bureaus in Africa alone.
A different world
Such moves reflect a world where autocracies are spreading and the number of democracies has been shrinking for decades.
And, indeed, one argument for scaling back funding for foreign state-funded news organizations such as RFA is that the world scarcely resembles the one in which it was founded.
It was inspired by an earlier Cold War model: Radio Free Europe. Originally funded by the CIA, RFE broadcast in over a dozen Eastern European languages since the 1950s.
There was overwhelming political support for RFA as it was built over the 1990s and entrenched into law in 1997 in a 401-21 vote in Congress.
A year later, when China's government blocked RFA's reporters from covering a presidential trip there, Bill Clinton personally met with those reporters and granted them interviews.
But the world and the U.S. position in it have changed.
Back then, the internet barely counted as mass media. Today, there are more smartphones in the world than people, allowing myriad ways to communicate.
The U.S. no longer has the same power to set the terms of the global conversation as it did when it had 10 times China's GDP, unrivalled military dominance and a balanced budget, as opposed to exploding debt today, and a less-dominant military.
Part of wider cuts to government-funded media
The Trump administration itself has said virtually nothing about its rationale for eliminating Radio Free Asia, specifically.
It has justified gutting government-funded media in general, from the agency that oversees Radio Free Asia, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe to NPR and PBS.
"He was elected in large part to reduce the federal bureaucracy, right?" State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said when asked about the cuts to Radio Free Asia.
"It's about waste and fraud, mismanagement. This is something that has to occur."
Fang is emphatic, however: That even in a world with countless ways to communicate, there's still a role for an organizations like hers.
She described a staffer working day and night, relentlessly calling sources in China to report on the Uyghur internment camps. "That was broken from here," she said.
U.S.-based staff, working in Mandarin, also broke stories about COVID for which there was voracious appetite inside China, she said. Video views increased eightfold at the time, including clicks from Wuhan, Fang said.
One Ipsos poll conducted for RFA in 2018 suggested as many as 44 million people a week may have accessed its content within China, about three per cent of its population.
A Gallup survey commissioned by the service in 2023 found that almost three-quarters of Cambodians surveyed were aware of RFA, and 8.5 per cent saw its work on a weekly basis.
"When we were created, it was with the understanding that having an educated citizenry in these different countries supporting democratic values would actually lead to awareness that is beneficial to U.S. interests," Fang said.
Reporters share their stories
A few remaining reporters were working on stories last week in the near-vacant newsroom in downtown Washington.
One involved a bullet-train project in Vietnam — with a look at a sole-source contract and questions about oversight.
Others touched on struggling tariff talks; a journalist arrested in Cambodia; and a Cambodian official telling Japan to avoid raising human rights during a political summit.
A few days earlier, there was an unusual story about a Cambodian police officer charged with drunk-driving. The arrest came after RFA posted an extraordinary crash video that drew millions of views and attention to the case.
"We made that big," said Poly Sam, director of the Cambodian service, himself a survivor of ghastly violence under the Khmer Rouge.
During a work pause, the few remaining reporters discussed their own personal stories.
Vuthy Tha is a single father of two young children, from Cambodia. He described threats from Cambodian officials, including from a cabinet minister and a spokesman for the governing party.
"We know where you live," he recalled the spokesman telling him when he was in hiding in Thailand. Some time after, he saw someone standing outside filming his home.
Asked what would happen to his kids if he's deported, Tha said he hopes co-workers might care for them.
His colleague Hum just became a dad last month. In the weeks before the birth, Hum had been worrying he'd lose his job and with it, his health coverage.
When the baby arrived March 26, and Hum still had his job, he took it as a sign and named the baby Lucky.
Khoa Lai of the Vietnamese service said he arrived in the U.S. months ago, hopeful that, here, he could write without fear, unlike in his home country, where he still uses a pseudonym for some reporting.
"I think it is a phase," he said of the recent moves against organizations like RFA. "I think it will pass soon. At the end of the day, I think America is still a country of freedom."
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