How protected are Minnesota’s refugees from deportation?

When ICE rounded up over a dozen Hmong men from Minnesota last month, the agency posted their photos online along with the criminal sex convictions for which the men were going to be deported to Laos, the agency said. The message was that the new administration is sweeping dangerous people off the street.

The arrests took the Twin Cities refugee community by surprise. Many of the men had come to America after the wars in Southeast Asia and lived in the Midwest for decades. They had families, including children born in America. In some cases they had committed their crimes as juveniles or young adults, completed their sentences long ago and had been discharged from probation.

They had little, if any, connection to Laos. In fact, relatively few American residents have ever been deported to Laos, according to annual reports from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The truth is, entering America as a refugee doesn’t vest anyone with special protection from deportation in the event of a criminal conviction.

Deportable crimes range from murder to nonviolent theft, and include offenses related to marijuana, which is still federally outlawed despite being legal for recreational use in half the states.

In Minnesota, the state Resettlement Programs Office funds an education series for recent arrivals, including a session that warns people to avoid trouble with the law because a criminal conviction could permanently block the path to citizenship and result in deportation.

“If you haven’t become a U.S. citizen, you are at risk of deportation ... and what we’ve seen with the arrest of Hmong individuals is they had been ordered deported based on past criminal convictions,” said Jennifer Stohl Powell, executive director of the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. “One of the differences is, in the past, some countries have been reluctant, have not accepted deportees, and that is changing under pressure from the current administration.”

Some refugees ran afoul of the law, lost their permanent resident status and were given deportation orders. For years, a steady stream of Southeast Asian people have been deported from all over America to Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, in some cases without any knowledge of the native language and culture of their country of ancestry. They’ve faced discrimination from locals and built communities of their own.

In contrast, Laos has refused to accept most people that America may have wanted to deport there.

“Up until recently, there was no real possibility that they were going to be deported because we didn’t have any kind of repatriation agreement with Laos,” said immigration lawyer Evangeline Dhawan-Maloney.

That means in the past, refugees from Laos who committed crimes in America may have been arrested by immigration authorities following their criminal convictions, given a deportation order and released back into the community. They continued to live in America in a state of legal limbo, required to report for regular check-ins with the ICE field offices. In the intervening decades, they became rooted in America, with careers and families.

Laos still does not have a repatriation agreement with the United States to accept deportees, but under the second Trump administration, more people of Laotian origin are being detained and sent to Laos, signaling a shift between the countries.

Once in Laos, it isn’t clear what resettlement services exist for American deportees who are unfamiliar with the country.

A nongovernmental organization in Laos’ capital city Vientiane, Village Focus International, set up a transition house for deportees a few years ago, but the Lao government at the time would not accept most of them, said Executive Director Richard Reece in an email. Village Focus International hosted only one person, so the U.S. Embassy closed the project, he said.

“In more recent days, at least 100 or more deportees have landed in Laos and face a challenge to integrate into a society they may never have lived in or left when they were small children,” Reece said. “VFI is not playing an active role in the new iteration of deportees.”

This month the U.S. Supreme Court gave the Trump administration the green light to deport people to third countries, like South Sudan, if the deportees’ countries of origin refuse to take them.

“What we are now seeing, unfortunately, is the U.S. government is essentially deporting these men to any country that will take them,” said Dhawan-Maloney. “We’re seeing folks, not just from Laos but other Southeast Asian countries that have final orders, being deported to South Sudan, where they quite realistically face pretty severe harm.”

McCollum’s Republican challenger at the time, Hmong-American lawyer Sia Lo, criticized her for “needlessly terrifying” the vast majority of Hmong residents who haven’t committed crimes and weren’t at risk of deportation.

McCollum’s bill did not pass. Her office did not respond to questions about whether she would revisit the issue.

When the Minnesota Star Tribune spoke to Hmong Minnesotans earlier this month about their reactions to local arrests, some wondered how many of the men swept up by ICE were victims of cultural misunderstanding. Traditional marriages between girls and older men were somewhat common among the first generation of Hmong refugees before they acclimated to American life.

It’s difficult to tell the full spectrum of criminal violations for which people are being deported because ICE doesn’t publicize every arrest, so those with minor crimes might pass largely unseen through the relatively opaque immigration court system.

Immigration cases are considered “confidential,” said immigration lawyer Katherine Santamaria Mendez, in that unlike regular criminal court proceedings with publicly posted filings and hearing schedules, the public cannot access immigration court cases. The only way to understand what is happening is to sit in immigration court and watch initial appearances and bond hearings.

These are usually cases of people who entered the country without status, or overstayed visas, not those who entered decades ago as refugees, she said.

A Hmong-Minnesota woman deported to Laos in March had pleaded guilty to swindling money from fellow church members by faking cancer. Another Hmong woman deported from Milwaukee, a mother of five, had been involved in a marijuana trafficking ring.

As for the Hmong men pictured in ICE’s announcement last month, a Star Tribune review of their criminal cases did not turn up any examples of marriage involving minors. Some originated in Wisconsin, and dated back to the 1990s and early 2000s. The now-disbanded Minnesota Gang Strike Force investigated some cases dealing with gang rapes and forced prostitution of girls under 16. A few men were convicted of abusing family members. In one case, involving non-forcible underage sex, the defendant unsuccessfully claimed he was also a teenager at the time, but had lied about being older in order to find work in America.

In almost all of the cases, the defendants pleaded guilty.