Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Tuesday joined a growing chorus of public officials opposing the Trump administration’s efforts to seek authority to deport Hmong and Lao back to Laos.
In a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Walz voiced strong opposition to the administration’s negotiations with the Communist government of Laos that could result in the deportation of legal permanent Minnesota residents to that country.
“Our Hmong and Lao neighbors are small business owners, combat veterans who fought alongside American soldiers, and passionate people who have shaped Minnesota’s culture into what it is today,” the DFL governor wrote. “Most of the Southeast Asian Americans with a deportation order have never lived in those countries or no longer have ties there. Uprooting this community is unjust, immoral, and a betrayal of our country’s patriotic duty to these refugees.”
Minnesota is home to 84,000 Hmong residents, the largest concentration in the United States, and 13,000 Lao residents, the fourth largest population in the country, Walz said.
“The thought of Minnesota’s Hmong and Lao families being torn apart due to deportation has spread fear and panic throughout Minnesota,” he wrote.
The Trump administration is asking Laos to accept Hmong and Lao natives of that country who are not U.S. citizens and have committed crimes or have deportation orders against them. Most of them have not been deported because of Laos’ long history of human rights violations against the Hmong.
HUNDREDS COULD BE FORCED TO LEAVE
Some 700 Minnesota residents could be at risk of deportation under the proposed agreement, the Coalition of Asian American Leaders told U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum of Minnesota in January.
McCollum, a Democrat from St. Paul, declared her opposition to the deportation plan in a Feb. 3 letter to Pompeo. “Any deportation of Hmong and Lao refugees residing in the U.S. to Laos will tear families apart while putting those individuals at risk in a country that has never been their home,” she wrote.
Last week, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers sent a similar letter to Pompeo expressing his opposition to the potential U.S.-Laotian deportation agreement. He wrote that many Hmong Wisconsinites came to the state as refugees seeking asylum from war and genocide.
Many of them fought on behalf of the United States during the Vietnam War. After Laos fell to Communists in 1975, those U.S. allies had to flee to escape persecution.
STATE COUNCIL OPPOSES THE CHANGE
On Monday, the Minnesota Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans, a non-partisan executive branch agency charged with advising the state government on matters affecting that community, issued a statement opposing the deportation of “legal, permanent residents for actions in their past that do not define them.”
The statement said the proposed agreement would allow the U.S. to deport Hmong and Lao residents who had once committed a crime, “even though many of them have completed their sentence and gone on to raise families and lead productive lives. Individuals who made mistakes, accepted the consequences, and have gone on to be valuable, contributing members of our community are the model of success of our justice system.”
Stripping them of their homes, communities and lives as Americans would be a “disproportionate level of punishment,” the council said.
Sia Her, the council’s executive director, said they issued the statement to “educate the community” and inform legislators and other policymakers about the deportation threat.