Twenty years ago, on June 6th, 1993, a dilapidated freighter carrying a human cargo of 286 Chinese migrants ran aground off the New York Rockaway peninsula after a hazardous four months sea voyage. It was the largest group of undocumented immigrants ever apprehended while trying to cross into the United States, and the televised rescue effort and widely published images of emaciated men huddled on a NYC beach covered in blue blankets became an enduring symbol of a new kind of immigration crisis, where concerns over border security met with the perception of rampant human smuggling operations run by Asian gangs.

A new body of work in progress, this series of diptychs and portraits sets out to convey the experiences of some of the men who agreed to pay exorbitant amounts of money for a smuggler’s passage to a new life in the United States, while placing those individual experiences into their historical context. The arrival of the Golden Venture occurred just as changes in U.S. immigration policy were imminent, ending an era of relative openness and reform, and heralding the beginning of large scale, indefinite detention for immigration infractions.

A brief interview with Sean Chen, pictured above, was featured on NPR’s StoryCorps selection to mark the anniversary, and PRI’s The World aired a segment that featured some of my images in an accompanying web gallery. Yet this is not a story that has a neat ending. Today, twenty former Golden Venture passengers who were awarded humanitarian parole by President Clinton in 1997, after spending almost four years in detention, continue to live their lives in a legal limbo.

There was no mechanism in place that would have allowed them to move towards permanent legal status or citizenship. They are paying taxes, own businesses, and are able to put their children through school, but they might be yanked out of that existence at any moment, and they had to give up on the possibility of ever again seeing the families that they had left behind. Like Sean, many have spouses and children who are American citizens, yet they themselves are unable to become permanent residents of the country in which they have lived for the last two decades.

You can read more about this piece of American history, and about the legal battles fought by a determined group of pro-bono lawyers and advocates that wound up all the way at the Supreme Court, in this Storify collection. The tale of the Golden Venture serves as a poignant symbol of the strong pull this country exerts on people all over the world who are desperate to forge a better life for themselves and their families. And it stands as a reminder of the price paid by the individual when caught up in the sea changes of shifting policies and changing national priorities.

When they were finally released from detention, the parolees began their American lives in a peculiar state of suspension – merely tolerated, and ultimately forgotten. And yet, they were the lucky ones. Ten people died that June night in 1993 as they braved the frigid, turbulent waters to reach the safety of the beach – the ship’s passengers believed that if they could only make it to shore, they might qualify for asylum or residency in the U.S. They are among the many unnamed and uncounted who have died trying to cross the southern desert, or who perished along their routes, far from American soil. There is no memorial for the dead, but let’s safeguard a space for them in the national collective consciousness.

See the web gallery for more images here.