A convicted migrant rapist on lifetime parole who managed to stay in the U.S. thanks to legal loopholes will finally be sent back home, The Post has learned.
Van Phu Bui fractured a Bronx man’s skull in 2022 with a brutal sucker-punch. Now serving time for that heinous crime, Bui, 56, will be deported back to his native Vietnam as soon as he’s released from prison, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official told The Post this week.
Bui came to the U.S. in 1985 through Seattle, seeking asylum. Six years later, he was in the Big Apple and arrested for the first time for attempted robbery, online court records confirm.
Additional details about that incident weren’t immediately available.
An immigration judge ordered Bui removed from the United States on Feb. 5, 1991, ICE said.
But Bui wasn’t booted because of a 1990 law that shielded migrants from deportation to countries facing natural disaster or war.
So Bui settled in Claremont in the Bronx, where he raped a teenage girl at gunpoint on Christmas Eve in 1994. He was convicted in 1995, and sentenced to 6 years to life, ultimately serving 20.
Yet officials were unable to deport him in 2015, thanks to a 2008 deal excluding Vietnamese nationals who arrived in the U.S. before 1995 from being repatriated.
“He should’ve been removed a long time ago,” an ICE source told The Post on condition of anonymity.
Then, in August 2022, Bui — now homeless — cold-cocked Jesus Cortes Cabrera without warning outside the Fuego Tipico Restaurant in Fordham Manor. Cortes Cabrera, who teaches Mexican dance to children, spent three weeks in the hospital with severe brain bleeding and a skull fracture.
The case sparked headlines after cops charged Bui with attempted murder, only to have the Bronx District Attorney’s Office downgrade the charge to assault. Bui was convicted in May and received a 3 1/2 to 7 years sentence.
Once Bui’s current sentence is served, he’ll finally be shipped back home, officials insisted, thanks to recently relaxed repatriation agreements first initiated in 2019 by the Trump administration.
“He will be amenable to removal from the United States to Vietnam upon completion of his prison sentence,” ICE said, adding Bui has agreed not to fight deportation.
Cortes Cabrera said learning of Bui’s decades-old deportation order was disappointing.
“I would have hoped that he got deported the first time, so he wouldn’t have hurt me,” Cortes Cabrera explained. “It shouldn’t have happened. … It’s a miracle I’m alive.”
Cortes Cabrera said Bui deserved more prison time than he got.
“[If] this guy spends three years in jail and then they deport him to Vietnam, I want him to stay in jail in Vietnam,” said Cortes Cabrera. “He is very, very bad, and he’ll do the same thing there. I don’t think he’ll change.”
Bui’s lawyer could not be reached for comment.
