Vang: Deporting these Hmong men isn’t justice — it’s a failure of America’s promise

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When I was a teenager growing up in St. Paul’s Frogtown neighborhood, it wasn’t uncommon to see 14- and 15-year-old Hmong girls married to older men and raising babies. Back in the ’80s, having just arrived in the United States, the Hmong didn’t know it was against the law.

The grown-ups around me — my parents, my uncles, our clan leaders — were just trying to replicate the only system they had ever known: A traditional Hmong way of life, built on survival, clan loyalty and cultural norms that didn’t fit neatly into American legal frameworks.

Today, I’m seeing that same cultural disconnect criminalized in a much more devastating way.

Across Minnesota, a couple dozen Hmong men — many of them fathers, husbands, workers and community leaders — are facing deportation to Laos, a country they fled or never knew, in many cases because of criminal records that are at least a decade old. In recent months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has detained or surveilled these men, some of whom have served time and rebuilt their lives. They have not reoffended, yet they are being rounded up like criminals.

This is not about public safety. This is about political theater by President Donald Trump and his supporters, and a dangerous misunderstanding of Hmong history and culture.

Similar to Michelle Alexander, whose work in “The New Jim Crow” laid bare the ways in which mass incarceration replaced segregation laws to continue racial oppression, I see this new wave of deportations as part of the same system. It’s not just broken — it was never built for us in the first place. The Hmong, a stateless people recruited by the CIA during the Vietnam War, were resettled in the United States without language, without context and without warning. We were expected to assimilate without any explanation of the rules.

Our elders were told America would give us freedom for helping save American lives, for giving our little boys to fight alongside American soldiers in the Secret War. They weren’t told how unforgiving the U.S. legal system could be. They weren’t told that youthful mistakes, often made under extreme poverty and trauma, could become permanent stains. And they certainly weren’t told that those mistakes would one day be used to exile them — and after they had built families, started businesses, coached soccer, paid taxes and become American in every way but citizenship.

Let me be clear: No one is excusing harm or serious crimes. But many of these cases involve nonviolent offenses from a long time ago. Some were committed as teenagers navigating the perils of gang violence and systemic poverty in the ’80s and ’90s. Others involved misunderstandings rooted in cultural norms — like underage marriage or hunting laws — that were not fully explained or understood.

And now, decades later, it is using those misunderstandings to disappear our fathers and brothers.

One man, Chia Neng Vue, has been detained by ICE after agents arrested him at his Coon Rapids home. Vue had already served time for a crime committed in his 20s. He’s now in his 40s, with a wife, a mortgage and children. His deportation would not make anyone safer — it would tear apart a family and further erode trust between immigrant communities and law enforcement.

If we are to be a nation of second chances, a nation that believes in redemption and the possibility of change, then we must say: Enough.

We must challenge the logic that says a person who made a mistake decades ago — especially under extreme social, economic and cultural conditions — is forever disposable. Almost everyone I knew growing up was in a gang or affiliated with a gang. Often we were thought to be in a gang just because there was a few of us hanging out and that made us feel safe. Even I was associated with a gang and was arrested as a teenager.

I am asking you to reject the idea that immigrants are welcome to do America’s dirty work but are not allowed to call this country home when peace comes.

To the policymakers and ICE officials who justify these deportations under the guise of law and order, I say: Justice without humanity is not justice.

And to my fellow Minnesotans, I say: Stand with us. Stand with the families who are now terrified every time there’s a knock on the door. Call your representatives. Speak up at town halls. Demand that our laws reflect not just punishment but mercy, context and the possibility of healing.

America promised my people refuge. It promised justice. Now is the time to deliver on that promise.