Minnesota’s Hmong community feeling a sense of betrayal amid ICE crackdowns

Videos taken by bystanders show the moment that agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) forcefully arrested Minnesota resident ChongLy Thao, who goes by Scott, from his St. Paul home earlier this year.

Thao, who is in his mid-fifties, is seen wearing only shorts and Crocs, with a child’s blanket draped around his shoulders, as he is taken away in subfreezing temperatures by agents wearing tactical gear. Onlookers blow warning whistles and car horns as they shout at the agents.

The raid was part of a federal immigration crackdown on Minnesota’s Twin Cities, called Operation Metro Surge, which peaked in January after the Trump administration deployed4,000 agents to the state in December. It mainly targeted people from the Somali, Latino, and Hmong communities.

Last week, Kristi Noem was removed from her post as Homeland Security Secretary. But White House Border Czar Tom Homan, who replaced Greg Bovino after two fatal shootings of US citizens, is still in charge of operations in the Twin Cities, and immigrant communities remain on edge.

After breaking down his door without a search warrant, Thao, who is Hmong American, turned out not to be the person the agents were looking for.

But the video made its rounds online and sparked horror through the Hmong community.

“That was terrifying, that shook our community,” said Cam Yang, a second-generation Hmong American who was raised on the east side of St. Paul and is a child of refugees.

As a community organizer, she said she’s glad to see people coming together at this difficult time.

“It has been so heartwarming. It has been wholesome to see everyone so united,” Yang said, especially because she added that this hasn’talways been the case.

During the police brutality that led to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, there was a split within the Hmong community.

“It was mainly because a lot of Hmong men, and even women, become police officers or enlist within the army. It’s something that is kind of ingrained into our community, especially because of our immigration history and our refugee stories of fighting alongside the US.”

During the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Washington secretly recruited and trained Hmong men in neighboring Laos to help fight the Communists in North Vietnam. After the war, they became targets of the Vietnamese for their collaboration with the United States. Thousands of them fled to refugee camps until they could be resettled in other countries, including the US.

With this history of serving alongside US forces, the ICE crackdowns have left many in the Hmong community feeling confused and betrayed.

“We’re still fearful [about] who and where we’re going to be stopped and questioned or taken away from [our] families,” said Txongpao Lee, the Executive Director of the Hmong Cultural Center in St. Paul.

He added that children have been afraid to go to school, especially because ICE agents sometimes use them as bait to arrest their parents.

“My kids, they are afraid of it. And they expressed that if they are not dropped off and picked up, they will not go to school,” he said.

The Hmong Cultural Center, where Lee works, has been around for more than three decades. 

In addition to offering classes and other services, it’s also provided a safe place for kids to come together — and stay out of trouble.

Some of the so-called criminals that ICE has been targeting and rounding up are people who may have committed minor crimes many decades ago as teenagers, but who went on to live normal lives and raise their own families. Now their pasts have come back to haunt them.

Although ICE operations have wound down in Minnesota, people are still on edge.

“We know they are still here and they are still executing their operations, and their targeting is still very similar,” said St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her, who took office in January at the height of the tensions in the Twin Cities. She is also the first Hmong American to hold that position.

The city has traditionally been welcoming to asylum seekers from all over the world, she said, and many of those detained already had their papers in order.

“Those individuals, because ICE was not familiar with their paperwork, we had a number of them actually get sent to facilities in Texas,” Her said. “We’ve had people who were detained because they were trying to be observers. We’ve had people who are just randomly getting targeted because of the way that they look or the way they sound, and they would be detained for hours.”

She said that many people also ended up being deported to Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Meanwhile, at Hmong Village, a shopping center for traditional clothing and ingredients needed for traditional recipes, community organizers Bobby and Hlee browsed the stalls. Neither of them felt comfortable sharing their full names amid the heightened tensions.

Hlee said there wasn’t a lot of support on the ground at first because not too many people of Asian descent were initially being stopped.

“Once that kind of started ramping up, our group really started to grow and we started to organize to see how best we could communicate and educate our community about what’s happening.”

Bobby said the Hmong community in the Twin Cities is unique because of its density and people’s proximity to each other.

“And so we have the privilege of building a lot of political infrastructure for ourselves and we build a lot of power in that way,” he said.

That power base includes Mayor Kaohly Her, who has been collaborating with other local and state officials to offset the upheaval her city has been through.

“I joined a lawsuit with Minneapolis Mayor Frey and Attorney General Keith Ellison,” she said. “We have joined lawsuits across the country around just trying to hold ICE accountable.”

She added that she’s been thankful all the communities have come together to help each other out.

“When it’s one community, it’s very easy to let that go under the radar,” Her said. “But when it was multiple communities and we were all standing up together, it made our voices much stronger and we could fight against this federal government.”