REFUGEE BETRAYAL

Trump Deports Hundreds Who Fled War He Dodged

The president has targeted refugees from the war he weaseled out of.

Donald Trump dodged the Vietnam War draft five times—and now he’s deporting refugees from that conflict at five times the pace of Joe Biden, immigration data analyzed by PunchUp shows. Trump, 79, received five draft deferments during the war, including a 1968 medical exemption for bone spurs written by a Queens podiatrist who rented his office from Fred Trump. His former lawyer, Michael Cohen, later testified that Trump admitted he made the injury up, telling him, “I wasn’t going to Vietnam.” Yet in the first seven months of his second term, ICE arrested 875 Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, and Thai nationals, according to PunchUp’s analysis of 505,000 I-213 forms released by The Guardian. Of those, 466 arrived during the 1975–1990 refugee window, with a median U.S. residency of 36 years—and nearly half had no criminal record at all. ICE quietly rescinded a 2008 agreement shielding pre-1995 Vietnamese immigrants from deportation in June 2025, as our sister Substack reported. A DHS spokesperson defended the surge, claiming countries that once refused their citizens “are now accepting their own citizens including pedophiles and sexual predators.” They did not address Trump’s draft-dodging. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

*For the full report and other exclusive scoops that speak truth to power, head over to PunchUp.,

See more of our coverage in your search results.

ADD THE DAILY BEAST ON GOOGLE

Tom LatchemLead Global Correspondent

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.