Democratic state Sen. Stephanie Chang of Detroit (left) listens as Democratic state Rep. Mai Xiong of Warren (right) speaks during a news conference regarding Hmong American immigrants recently detained by ICE. Aug. 7, 2025 | Photo by Ben Solis/Michigan Advance
For Democratic State Rep. Mai Xiong, the struggle against ICE human rights abuses and the deportation affecting the nation’s immigrant communities are hitting closer to home.
Xiong is currently working on behalf of the family of 15 Hmong immigrants who made their home in the United States decades ago but are now facing deportations following a July 30 ICE roundup in Detroit.
In a news conference held Thursday outside the Michigan Capitol, Xiong said that she and others are doing what they can and working with attorneys to free those individuals from detention centers before they can be deported. Xiong was joined in that fight by fellow Democrats, including state Sen. Stephanie Chang of Detroit, state Sen. Sam Singh of East Lansing and state Rep. Emily Dievendorf of Lansing.
Xiong said the federal government’s immigration policies and priorities were misplaced, and that those being targeted were active and respected members of their communities.
“Instead of our federal leaders focusing on policy changes to reform the immigration system, they are throwing billions of dollars into hiring more ICE officers while providing sign-on bonuses to snatch people,” Xiong said. “We are going to see more detainments, more deportations. If you are not upset, you should be.”
The most recent ICE activity in Michigan is personal for Xiong: the representative from Warren is a Hmong American who was born in a refugee camp in Thailand before immigrating to the U.S. when she was three-years-old.
Hmong people are an ethnic group originating from Mongolia with a noted diaspora into Southeast Asia, particularly Laos and Thailand. Hmong served as key recruits by the CIA during the Vietnam War fighting the Johnson and Nixon administrations’ secret war in Laos and supporting anti-communist forces.
Many Hmong immigrants were either born in refugee camps or fled to the U.S. directly to escape war and political strife. That’s made them easy targets for deportations under the new Trump regime but with few options for sending them what the administration views as their country of origin, mainly because the U.S. and Laos lack a formal repatriation agreement for deported individuals.
By proxy, Hmong are considered stateless people if deported because Laos, in particular, has said for years that they will not take them back because it doesn’t view them as citizens. Those born in refugee camps in Thailand have faced similar situations, as the country has recently moved to label them also as illegal immigrants ripe for deportation enforcement.
Although the administration of President Donald Trump promised to focus its immigration enforcement activities on hardened criminals and gang members, scores of people this year without criminal histories have been rounded up and disappeared from their communities – all in the name of purging the nation of immigrants.
While many of those individuals have been immigrants of a Latin origin, several other ethnic groups have been targeted in ICE raids and deportations, including Americans of African, Middle Eastern and Asian descent.
Xiong said ICE’s gaze has now turned to hardworking and community-focused members of the Hmong community in Michigan. A rally is planned for Friday in support of Hmong Michiganders who were recently nabbed by ICE under the pretext of routine immigration interviews.
ICE also is in the process of deporting Lue Yang, a 47-year-old St. Johns resident, who Xiong described as a pillar of his community. Yang came to the U.S. as an asylum seeker in the late 1970s and pleaded guilty as an accessory to a home invasion when he was young. He has since turned his life around, raised a family and became a leader among Hmong in Michigan.
His prior guilty plea, however, was offered and accepted without much legal assistance or an explanation of how it would affect his immigration status in his later years. The situation has left him unable to secure a green card through spousal sponsorship, and has now ensnared him in ICE’s grip.
Yang is being held in the recently reopened North Lake ICE facility in Baldwin. He was one of the few who was nabbed in a voluntary check in with immigration officials on July 15. The others who were detained on July 30 were duped, Xiong said, with vague letters from immigration officials saying they just wanted to conduct interviews. Several were processed in Baldwin and later moved to Texas then Louisiana, which is believed to be their final destination in the U.S. before being deported to Laos.
“Most of these individuals have never been to Laos or were not born there,” she said. “Their parents fled Laos because of war and persecution.”
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Aside from the lack of a cooperation agreement between Laos and the U.S., Trump’s travel ban to and from Laos has complicated the situation. Xiong said it is advocates’ working theory that the Trump administration has sanctioned Laos in order to secure backroom deals for the country to accept new deportees.
“Refugees living in Michigan do not have a safe country to return to. Michigan is their home,” Xiong said. “This is where their families and communities and workplaces are. I hope that my constituents will understand that tearing families apart, removing taxpayers and workers from our communities, placing them in private for-profit detention centers funded by our public dollars, and deporting them when they have been longtime residents of our state is not good economic policy.”
Yang’s wife, Ancy Vue, spoke alongside Xiong at length and shared her husband’s story. Vue said he is a good man who works tirelessly to support and raise his family, and that his good health was deteriorating fast. She is not allowed to see him often and is under tight restrictions when she is allowed.
Aside from the effect ICE has had on her own family, Vue said targeting Hmong people, after fighting for American freedom overseas and helping build a vibrant social patchwork in communities across the nation, the Trump administration was breaking a long held promise to Hmong immigrants to protect them.
“Please help me and our families in the many that are suffering, there are many that have not heard from their loved ones since detainment and being transferred. This is our home,” Vue said. “These are our children. This is my husband, and this is our fight. Let him come home, let our families be whole again, and let America keep its promise.”
One avenue to get Yang and others home is to challenge the legality of the warrants and arrests used to detain them, including the rapid transfer of those detainees to different facilities to obfuscate their whereabouts.
Aisa Villarosa, an attorney with the Asian Law Caucus, said that by ending opportunities for fair immigration proceedings, detaining both immigrants and citizens, and taking people into custody without giving them a chance to confer with an attorney, the Trump administration has made its priorities clear.
“None of us are safe when families are ripped apart. We call on state and local officials to stand firmly for due process,” Villarosa said. “Now is the time for our leaders to do everything they can to protect us, including our immigrant and refugee neighbors.”
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