A Milwaukee woman who was deported to Laos by the Trump administration earlier this month is deeply “shaken” by the prospect of spending more than a decade away from her partner and five children back home in Wisconsin, activists helping the family told The Independent.
Ma Yang, a 37-year-old Hmong-American, has been living in a government facility outside the Laotian capital of Vientiane for the past couple of weeks after being forced to leave her family and friends in the U.S.
Yang was born in a refugee camp in Thailand but gained legal status as a permanent U.S. resident until she pleaded guilty to cannabis-related charges and served 30 months in federal prison. Having taken a plea deal mistakenly believing that her green card would not be at risk, she is now one of the “millions and millions” of people Donald Trump pledged to kick out of America during his re-election campaign.
The Independent traveled to Laos this week and spoke to a Hmong rights group that has been advocating on Yang’s behalf, as well as activists and lawyers with knowledge of her case. Tammie Xiong, executive director of the Hmong American Women’s Association, said it was providing support to her family in the U.S., and that she was still processing what had happened to her but “doing OK for the most part.”
Yang declined to be interviewed for this piece and has not spoken out since her story was featured in her local newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, last week. Despite her ordeal, Yang and her longtime partner, Michael Bub, “have been advised to not talk to anyone,” another Hmong-American rights activist said, until she has more clarity about her fate.
Yang claims to have never been to Laos or known anyone from the small landlocked Southeast Asian country, nestled between Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam and a world away geographically, culturally and linguistically from the United States’ midwest.
Her life in America unraveled last month when, more than two years after serving her time in prison, she was told to report to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Milwaukee. She was detained upon arrival and sent to Indiana, then Chicago on commercial flights, and finally shipped off to Laos. After being held in a rooming house for five days, a military officer in charge of her situation told her she could leave the facility if she wanted.
Sources told The Independent she has stayed on at a government facility, branded a “school” or “re-education centre” by the Laos authorities, as she is afraid of stepping outside alone in a country of six million people and few English speakers, not knowing who to contact or where to stay. Yang was taken to a military hospital on Monday night by the Laotian authorities after staying for days without insulin for her diabetes and running out of her medication for high blood pressure.
While the road ahead in Laos remains deeply uncertain, what’s clear is that it will be a long and difficult legal battle for her to return to America and be reunited with her family.
Immigration lawyer Jath Shao told The Independent that even if she is successful in overturning her deportation through the U.S. legal system, she would most likely not be allowed back until at least the 2040s.
“She would have to wait for at least 10 years outside the U.S. to apply for an I-212 waiver of inadmissibility to come back based on extreme hardship to her U.S. citizen spouse or children,” Shao said.
He says because the waiver is discretionary, “unless something crazy happens like marijuana becoming federally legal with retroactive effect, she probably has no realistic way back to the U.S. Even if she did, it might be into the 2040s,” he says.
In her interview last week to her local newspaper, Yang said the Trump administration had “sent me back to die.”
“How do I rent, or buy, or anything, with no papers?” Yang said. “I’m a nobody right now.”
It is not immediately clear why Laos accepted Yang’s deportation despite her not being from the country.
The Laos national assembly is in the process of debating changes to the constitution to formally recognise the Lao diaspora, thereby strengthening ties with those who have acquired foreign citizenship after leaving the country during historical migrations. Though still at the draft stage, it could offer Yang a route to documentation in Laos at least.
Kham S Moua, the national deputy director of the non-profit Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (Searac), criticized Yang’s deportation, saying that such extreme measures not only harm the individuals involved but tear apart families and disrupt entire communities.
Yang’s deportation will force her young children in the U.S. to live without their mother. “Ma should have been given a second chance after she served her sentence. Instead, because our enforcement system has few restraints, she was deported and her family shattered,” Moua told The Independent.
He added: “We must remember that Hmong Americans, like other Southeast Asian refugees, live in the U.S. because our families sacrificed their lives to support this country during the Secret War in Laos and the Vietnam War.
“Southeast Asian Americans of refugee backgrounds continue to face significant socioeconomic challenges and their convictions are often directly tied to the barriers they face as survivors of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and war while trying to live the American dream.”
The Trump administration in 2019 made a verbal agreement to deport a “significant number of individuals” with final removal orders to Laos, according to Searac, although there has been no formal written deal on deportations between the both countries. That year, the Trump administration deported five people to the Southeast Asian nation.
America has previously funded a reintegration program in Laos for deported individuals who do not speak Lao or have family connections through USAID — though it isn’t clear whether that is still operational given the Trump cuts to the agency.
Others could be destined to follow in Yang’s footsteps; more than 4,800 Lao nationals are among the over 1.4 million individuals with final deportation orders in the U.S., according to a November ICE report.
“I hear all the time from people that ‘Trump is only after the criminals’ but if you look at the system, only 11,500 of almost 4 million people in deportation are ‘criminals’ – that’s 0.3 per cent of people in deportation compared to one third of American citizens having a criminal record,” says Shao.
“Given that they’re firing immigration judges left and right, it does not seem realistic for them to be able to mass deport millions (the highest ever in a year is less than half a million) within 4 years unless they trample all over the constitution and human rights.
“That’s why they are trying to do things like we see in the cases of Mahmoud Khalil and the Venezuelans deported to El Salvador for having tattoos — to eliminate due process and appeals and people’s rights.”
It could also become increasingly difficult for Yang’s children and other family in Wisconsin to visit her here in Laos going forward, with reports suggesting Trump is mulling a new travel ban on more than a dozen countries. Laos is one of the five countries that could face partial suspensions that would affect tourist and student visas as well as other immigrant visas.
