KTLA · https://ktla.com/news/local-news/army-vet-purple-heart-recipient-self-deports-after-48-years-in-u-s/
Shot defending the U.S. in Panama, then convicted as his war trauma went untreated and made to leave the only country he knew. A governor's pardon cracks the door.
Perhaps he was separated from you for a while that you would have him forever, no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother… receive him as you would receive me.
Philemon 1:15-17
On Friday, August 28, New York Governor Kathy Hochul erased two old convictions belonging to Sae Joon Park: bail jumping and drug possession, both from a stretch of his life when his war trauma went untreated. He read the news from Seoul.
Park came to the United States at seven. At nineteen he joined the Army, and in the 1989 invasion of Panama he was shot in the back. The country gave him a Purple Heart. Years later, after the convictions, it revoked his green card, and in June 2025 handed him a choice between detention and leaving on his own. He left, to a homeland he had not seen in nearly fifty years, without his partner, his children, or his parents.
So a man who once bled for the country now waits to learn whether it will take him back.
Paul's short letter to Philemon is about exactly this, and only this. It is not a treatise on Roman slavery law. It is one man asking another to receive a returning man into the household as a brother. Paul does not pretend nothing is owed.
Philemon 1:18But if he has wronged you at all, or owes you anything, put that to my account.
That single line is the whole mechanism of a pardon. It does not say the record was never real. It moves the debt onto someone else's account so a shut door can open. Park's lawyers still cannot bring him home; the pardon only lets them ask the immigration court to reopen his case. "Still not done," he said. But hopeful.
What a pardon undoes is the record. What it cannot undo is the leaving: the parents growing older across an ocean, the ordinary days with his children he will not get back. The door is not open yet. For the first time since he left, it is no longer locked.