The Hmong Village Market is a restaurant and retail space tucked into an industrial corner of St. Paul. Small, family-owned stalls offering brightly colored, traditional Hmong clothing sit alongside counter-service restaurants that sell big bowls of pho, sticky rice, bubble tea, and other cultural delicacies that have worked their way into the Midwestern food scene in recent decades.
Outside, in warm weather, long tables hold piles of fresh vegetables grown on local farms by Hmong American families.
The St. Paul metro area is home to nearly 60,000 people of Hmong descent—the most of any city in the United States. The Hmong Village Market is both a hub for the community and a popular destination for foodies, curiosity seekers, and those interested in celebrating the multicultural vibrancy of St. Paul.
Wikimedia Commons
A Hmong-American woman selling produce at the Frogtown Farmer's Market in St. Paul, Minnesota.
But on February 15, the market fell victim to the fear-mongering and anti-immigrant sentiment that has flourished during the Trump Administration. An anonymous source posted a fake news item on a prank news website, alleging that the Hmong Village Market had been raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.
The fake news piece looked real. A cached version of it can still be found on the website, which offers anonymity and the unchecked use of highly offensive racial epithets. The article features a photo of two grim-looking police officers carting away boxes amid a backdrop that resembles the Hmong marketplace.
The ICE raid might seem obviously fake now, but it certainly caused a ripple of panic to race through a community that is already on edge, thanks to a new deportation threat from the federal government.
Earlier in February, Hmong and Laotian people living in the United States learned that the Trump Administration has been making plans to deport thousands of them back to Laos. News reports have documented Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent meetings with Lao Foreign Minister Saleumxay Kommasith in Washington, D.C., as part of an effort to strengthen ties between the two countries.
This strengthening of ties apparently involves the Lao government being asked to accept more than 4,700 Hmong and Lao American people with standing deportation orders back into their country, on behalf of the United States government.
The deportation orders mostly come from old criminal convictions, according to a report in the Star Tribune. St. Paul resident Betty McCollum, a Democrat who represents Minnesota’s fourth congressional district, first raised the alarm about the Trump administration’s plans and is reportedly planning on introducing legislation to block the deportation orders.
It would be worthwhile to pause here and remember why thousands of people of Hmong and Laotian descent live in the United States, and it all goes back to the Vietnam War.
Hmong people were initially not allowed into the United States in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, as they were reportedly considered too “primitive.” Too foreign. Not productive or educated enough, perhaps.
Hailing from the forests and mountains of Laos—a country that Hmong people have lived in for thousands of years as an ethnic minority—the Hmong and Laotian people fought alongside the United States in the Vietnam War in hope of maintaining their autonomy. They suffered mightily during the war, dying at a far higher rate than American soldiers.
Many civilians were killed, too, as their villages burned and disease, famine, and terror set in.
When Laos and Vietnam fell to a communist regime in 1975, many Hmong and Laotian people became refugees overnight, in their own country. They were subject to displacement, forced labor camps, and starvation. Some drowned when they tried to flee the country by crossing the Mekong River into Thailand.
Hmong people were initially not allowed into the United States in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, as they were reportedly considered too “primitive.” Too foreign. Not productive or educated enough, perhaps.
This is the racist lens that undergirds so many stories of those forced to live on the margins, inside and outside of the United States. In Minnesota, we have the Dakota people who lived in this region long before any white settlers arrived. The escalating conflict between the Dakota and the colonizing forces behind Minnesota’s emerging statehood resulted in the Dakota-U.S. War of 1862.
It is a story of genocide and forced removal that I never heard while growing up in Minneapolis. Only in recent years has the Dakota version of events been allowed to seep into our collective consciousness as a proud, mostly progressive state.
And only recently did I learn about the internment camp that many Dakota people were kept in near the Minnesota River in the 1860s, before they were forcibly led out of Minnesota.
I remember, too, being a child in Minneapolis, in a nearly all-white neighborhood and school, when Hmong refugees began showing up in our community. They had funny names, to our Westernized ears, and they wore mismatched clothes as they huddled together in seemingly silent groups. We didn’t know who they were or why they were suddenly in our classrooms and on our playgrounds.
No one ever told us their story.
Now, decades later, we celebrate the infusion of color and culture Hmong Americans have brought to Minnesota. Many people revel in the Hmong Village Market and the smattering of independent, family-owned restaurants that dot busy boulevards throughout St. Paul.
Still, the memories of war, abandonment, terror, and separation must have immediately risen to the surface for many Hmong people last week, when news of an ICE raid tore through the community.
The website that hosted the fake news item has a garish clown on it, hoisting a banner that says, “You got owned!” and features a trio of laugh emojis near the top of the page. It seems painfully obvious that it was created to taunt people and provoke an angry response, especially since the made-up news piece mentions that one “positive sign” of the raid was the way Hmong Trump supporters were likely to be spared from the round-up.
Playing on people’s fears and concocting dramatic stunts designed to induce a frantic response has become a feature of our current political landscape. It worked in St. Paul recently. How many more scare tactics and anonymous, online examples of fear-mongering can we expect to see as the 2020 election gains momentum?