Two dozen Hmong Minnesotans await deportation to Laos after new round of ICE arrests

Two dozen Hmong men who have lived in Minnesota for decades are being held in Minnesota and Iowa jails awaiting deportation, according to the executive director of a Twin Cities-based Hmong advocacy organization.

The St. Paul field office for Homeland Security Investigations recently posted on X the names and arrest photos of men from Laos or Thailand that the agency said were living in the country illegally and have criminal records. The posts said most are in their 40s and labeled them as convicted sex offenders.

The arrests come during a time of stepped-up immigration enforcement by President Donald Trump’s administration. While national attention has focused on California after last month’s Los Angeles protests of immigration raids, Minnesota has seen an increase in arrests as well.

In the first five months of the Trump administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement made 732 arrests in Minnesota, nearly equal to the total in 2024, according to the Deportation Data Project.

“A dangerous alien is off the streets. 43 y/o Chia Neng Vue from Laos - a convicted sex offender for 1st degree criminal sexual conduct,” read one of the recent Homeland Security X posts.

But some members of the Twin Cities’ Hmong community, at 80,000 the largest urban Hmong population in the country, see the deportations in a more nuanced way.

Chia Vue, for example, has a criminal record. As a minor, he was convicted as an adult in 1998 of first-degree criminal sexual conduct and felony for the benefit of a gang. He was sentenced to more than seven years in prison. Since then, he’s had several other convictions, mostly for firearms-related charges. All his convictions are more than a decade old.

A GoFundMe page for his family describes him more sympathetically: A refugee who came to the United States at 4 years old and was orphaned before he began elementary school. A troubled teen and young adult who served prison time and had his immigration documents confiscated. A man who has since become “a completely different person,” according to his brother’s GoFundMe post. He’s a married father of five kids ages 3 to 17 and an avid gardener who owns a business selling plants, according to a family friend.

The Sahan Journal interviewed Vue in jail and published a doorbell camera video of his arrest.

Some Hmong Minnesotans say they suspect many of the decades-old arrests that led to the deportations were a result of Hmong culture encouraging girls as young as 14 to date and even marry older men, which is against U.S. law. Their lives in Southeast Asia often lacked education, several Hmong Minnesotans said, and it’s not uncommon that they didn’t understand American laws.

They say these men served their time and that deportation amounts to double jeopardy.

And they point out that the men came to the United States legally as refugees from the so-called “Secret War” in Laos. Hmong soldiers fought alongside U.S. soldiers in the Laotian Civil War of the 1960s and 1970s, where covert U.S. involvement was part of the fight against communism in Southeast Asia.

“To the Hmong community, this is a betrayal,” said Darling Yaj, executive director of the Hmong 18 Council, a Hmong advocacy organization. “We came here as legal immigrants, not illegally.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to questions seeking more information about the arrests and deportation process, nor did the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE.

Information from the Deportation Data Project shows ICE arrested nearly 2,000 people in Minnesota between Sept. 1, 2023, and June 10, 2025, with about 60% of them having one or more criminal convictions or pending criminal charges.

The vast majority of those arrested were from Mexico or Central America; only a handful were from Laos.

“One of the ladies reached out to me and said ICE came in their house and took her husband, and the children are just traumatized,” Yaj said. “It’s causing a lot of chaos within the community. Families are being torn apart. Children are being left behind without a parent.”

The Lao Embassy in Washington, D.C., has recently been flooded with calls from people in the United States with roots in Laos following the increase in deportations.

Consular officer Moua Her said the Lao Embassy typically accepts about 10 deportees annually, but so far this year, it has issued travel documents for 145 people to be deported to Laos.

Deportation is a negotiated decision because the receiving country needs to accept the individual. Sanctions, travel bans and other penalties can force reluctant countries to take deportees.

This year, Her believes the embassy has accepted all the cases they’ve received.

“Because we have no choice,” Her said.

Since the Trump administration has deported U.S. immigrants to countries where they have no connections — a move the Supreme Court recently validated — Her said the Lao Embassy was pressured to accept deportees rather than risk them being sent elsewhere.

Her confirmed some of the Hmong Minnesotans arrested in June have already been issued documents for deportation; for others, it should only be a matter of weeks.

Details of the men’s criminal records vary. A 2020 criminal complaint against one whose arrest photo was posted on Homeland Security Investigations’ X account detailed the sexual abuse of two girls, which began when they were 4 and 6.

Searches of Minnesota and federal criminal records showed that five men with the same names and birth years as the arrestees in the X posts had been convicted of felony sexual offenses. (Offenses that occurred outside Minnesota or when the perpetrator was a minor would not appear among these records.) Most crimes took place a decade or more ago in the Twin Cities metro area.

The Sahan Journal reported that some of the Hmong people arrested last month committed their crimes as minors — and all have served their sentences.

This week at the Hmongtown Marketplace, a sprawling St. Paul bazaar of Hmong businesses, Hmong Minnesotans cautioned against painting these arrestees with a broad brush.

Cher Her of St. Paul, a surgical instrument repair technician who was there buying medicinal herbs, said people with extensive, violent criminal records deserve deportation.

But he pointed out the cultural complications in a Hmong culture where people often marry young. Her married at 16; he’s now 41, married to the same woman and has eight kids. He’s been a U.S. citizen for decades. He worries how shifting deportation tactics could affect his brother, who got in trouble with the law as a teen but has since matured and has a job, wife and family.

“It’s got to be case by case,” he said. “If they have a family and kids and made a life here, why didn’t you deport them back then? Are you going to refund them the past 10 years of their lives?”

State Sen. Foung Hawj, a DFLer who represents the east side of St. Paul and is Hmong, said when members of that group began arriving here in the 1980s, they didn’t know American marriage laws, so it was common for 18-year-olds to marry 16-year-olds.

Hawj doesn’t oppose deporting violent criminals, but he believes deporting Hmong people for early marriage is patently unfair.

“These are people whose parents fought and died for this country, and they don’t know what the repercussions are of sending them back to our enemy state,” Hawj said. “Here we are, sending their children back over some petty misdemeanor, or things like early marriage that are transitioned by culture.”

The arrests especially hit home for Jennifer Yang, a 47-year-old mother of eight from Hugo. She was pregnant in middle school and married at 14; school counselors called police, and the man — still her husband today — was put on probation.

She recounted stories of underage women dating or marrying adult men with the blessing of both families, common practice in Hmong culture. She said that if the relationship sours — or if the family’s demand for a proper dowry isn’t met — the American legal system can be used against the man. She worries a relative may be at risk of deportation; he married an underage Hmong girl decades ago and spent a few months in jail for sex crimes after the marriage soured.

“It’s seen in the eyes of American culture as, ‘You’re a predator,’ ” she said. “But in Hmong culture, he did nothing wrong.

“Everyone is fearful about what’s going to happen in the next few months,” she continued. “How can they send you to another country you’re not even connected to? How can you be dropped off and just be told, ‘OK, this is it’?”

Sarah Nelson and Karina Kumar of the Minnesota Star Tribune contributed to this story.