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They Fought For Us - Now We're Deporting Them
Description
In the 1960s, the CIA recruited tens of thousands of Hmong farmers and warriors in Laos to fight a secret proxy war on behalf of the United States. They rescued downed American pilots, ran intelligence operations, and died by the thousands — doing work Congress never officially authorized. When the U.S. withdrew in 1975, it left them behind. After surviving massacres, refugee camps, and decades of displacement, most of them rebuilt their lives here, in America. Now the government is deporting them.
Since the summer of 2025, ICE has been arresting Hmong residents across Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin — many of them here for forty years, some U.S. citizens swept up in raids. In Indiana, two Southeast Asian refugees — a Cambodian man named Lorth Sim and a Vietnamese man named Tuan Van Bui — died in the same newly-opened detention facility within weeks of each other. No network interviewed their families. No crew was sent. John Carlos Frey investigates the most underreported deportation story in America: a community that fought for this country, fled to this country, and is now being erased by it — while the cameras look the other way.
https://theraidpodcast.org/
https://sahanjournal.com/immigration/hmong-deportation-ice-minnesota-laos/
https://www.startribune.com/hmong-minnesotans-face-deportation-laos-ice-arrests/601385285
https://asamnews.com/2026/04/08/cambodian-vietnamese-detainee-deaths-ice-indiana/
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