After more than two months in detention, a San Diego man taken into custody at his yearly Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-in has returned home.

Chuong Dong came to the U.S. from Vietnam as a 12-year-old refugee in 1980 and received a green card shortly thereafter. He pleaded guilty to robbery for stealing two speakers as a teen, spent some time in prison and was ordered deported in 1999. But Vietnam would not take him or anyone else back as a matter of policy, so he was told to check in with ICE annually, doing so with no issue for 25 years.  

This past summer, he filed a motion based on a 2017 California law allowing a conviction to be vacated if the defendant can prove they did not understand the immigration implications of their plea. But as Dong awaited a hearing in that matter, he went to his most recent check-in in August, where ICE agents took him into custody, placing him into handcuffs as he said goodbye to his wife.

“I was pretty traumatized,” Dong said Tuesday. “I was scared because I’ve been out for 26 years, never been in trouble, you know? And I don’t understand why.”

Chuong Dong came to the U.S. at the age of 12 as a refugee in 1981, was abused at home and dropped out of school, eventually stealing two speakers at age 19, reports NBC 7’s Shelby Bremer.

Dong was taken to the Otay Mesa Detention Center for a month and three weeks, he said, then transferred to a facility in Bakersfield, awaiting deportation.

“I came here when I was young, very young,” he said, “And I don’t have family back there, so, you know, I don’t know what to do.”

“Difficult” was how his wife Christy Huynh – an American citizen – described the months without him, breaking into tears. “I basically do everything by myself.”

Dong and Huynh work together inspecting hospital construction projects. She took on his work, paid their bills alone and fought his case.

“There’s a lot of times, like, I want to give up because I was under very, like – a lot, a lot of stress,” Huynh said. “But I just hide in some corner and then cry my stress out. Cry a whole lot and then, OK, continue: I’m not going to give up on him.”

Days after he was detained, a San Diego County judge vacated Dong’s old deportable conviction. Any other old, non-deportable convictions were vacated as well, and his immigration attorney then filed to stop his removal proceedings. On Oct. 22, they found out he was coming home with his green card restored.

“The first thing I do is hold his hand because that’s what we normally do when we’re in the car driving,” Huynh said. “We were like, ‘I still can’t believe this happening,’ you know? There’s so much joy.”

“I’m given a second chance at life, you know, to finish what I started,” Dong said.

“We take this as a major victory in, you know, what is otherwise pretty challenging times right now for immigration,” Dong’s immigration attorney Derek Poulsen said.

Poulsen said he’s seen many others in the same position, urging anyone in a similar position to explore their pathways.

“There’s a lot of people that I speak with who actually do have a way to become legal in the United States, but they’re so scared from current policy and everything that they see going on in the news that they don’t even look to see what their options are,” he said, adding, “To reopen that case and to get them their green card back, I mean – that’s why we do what we do.”

Dong said he was in the detention center alongside many people from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia with old convictions like him.

“The people that I was in with, everyone had a story. But it wasn’t the worst of the worst,” Dong said. “It seemed like everybody give up.”

Dong and Huynh said they got home to San Diego at around 2 a.m. and turned around at 6 a.m. to head straight back to work on the inspection of a new skilled nursing facility in La Mesa, slated to be completed by November.

“I think I make it just in time to help my wife get the project done so the patients can move in and they have a home,” Dong said.

“We didn’t really have time to celebrate yet,” he continued. “Maybe this weekend we can do something. Just a small get together with family.”

But since Dong never had paperwork before to leave the country and return, Huynh said they’ve never taken a vacation, so she has bigger plans: a family trip to Europe or Asia.

“He would always say, ‘Oh, I can YouTube and see everything,’” Huynh said. “But now that thinking has changed. He says, “I would love to go with you.’”

The couple said they have spent more than $70,000 on attorneys and legal fees trying to fix his status for several years, even before he was detained – a price they said was worth every penny.

“It’s like, better than winning $1 million. Better than winning a lottery,” Huynh said. “Nothing can compare to his freedom.”

“He’s the love of my life, you know? So I would never give up on him,” she continued. “If I had to do it again, I would do it again.”