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Donald Trump dodged the Vietnam War draft five times—and now he’s sending back refugees from that conflict in droves, immigration data analyzed by PunchUp shows.
In the first seven months of his second term, Trump’s ICE arrested 875 Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, and Thai people, at five times the pace of Joe Biden’s last year in office.
Of those, 466 arrived in the U.S. between 1975 and 1990—the Vietnam War refugee window—with the youngest being just 1 month old. The median time spent in America for those whom Trump has rounded up is 36 years.
The figures, taken from 505,000 ICE I-213 forms released last month by The Guardian following litigation by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, show the largest spike in Southeast Asian refugee arrests in more than two decades.
Trump, 79, never went to Vietnam himself. He received five draft deferments during the war—four for college and a fifth medical deferment in 1968 for bone spurs in his heels.
The diagnosis was written by a Queens podiatrist named Larry Braunstein, who, as the New York Times reported in 2018, rented his office from Trump’s father, Fred. Braunstein’s daughter, Elysa, told the Times that her father made the diagnosis “as a favor” to the Trumps.
Years later, Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, testified under oath to Congress that Trump told him he had made the injury up. “I wasn’t going to Vietnam,” he said Trump told him. When Cohen asked for the medical records, there were none.
In 2015, Trump mocked the late Sen. John McCain—a U.S. Navy aviator shot down over Hanoi, who spent five and a half years in a North Vietnamese prison camp—by saying, “I like people who weren’t captured.”