By Melissa Nann Burke, Beth LeBlanc, MediaNews Group
St. Johns — The email landed in attorney Nancy Xiong’s inbox that day in October with an official document that she’d been hoping for for months.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had granted Xiong’s client — a Hmong refugee who lived in Michigan for 45 years — a rare pardon for a low-level crime from when he was a teenager.
The document arrived an hour before Lue Yang, a father of six from St. Johns, was due to be loaded onto a deportation flight to Southeast Asia. Now, the governor’s gesture had wiped out the crime for which he was to be removed from the U.S.
The lawyer scrambled to reach the covey of Michigan elected officials who could help get word of the pardon to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in Louisiana in time to pull Yang from the flight before he was dropped off in the communist nation of Laos — a country he’d never been to and where he didn’t speak the language.
Yang’s wife, Ann, reached him by phone in the ICE detention center to share the news of the pardon. What does it mean, he asked her.
“It means you still have a chance,” Ann told him.
But later that evening, Yang was shackled with other detainees and put on the deportation flight out of Alexandria, Louisiana. It landed in Maryland and departed again hours later. That’s when Yang said he felt the plane turning in the air, eventually returning to Louisiana.
His legal team stayed up all night and into the next day, tracking the plane and drafting an emergency motion to halt Yang’s deportation, having it hand-delivered to an immigration court in Virginia, Xiong said.
Meanwhile, Yang’s congressman, Republican Tom Barrett of Charlotte, and the office of U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, a Bloomfield Township Democrat, were pushing within the federal government to get him off the flight.
When the removal flight took off next in the wee hours of Oct. 24, Yang wasn’t on it.
He phoned his wife, who could hear the noise of the plane leaving in the background, she said.
“He was crying,” Ann recalled. “He was no longer on the list.”
The harrowing episode that played out over three days felt like a scene out of a Hollywood movie, she said.
It would be weeks before Yang was returned to an ICE facility in northern Michigan and later released to his family on Dec. 3.
Despite the pardon, he remains in legal limbo with the possibility that ICE could scoop him up again.
Shuffling between ICE facilities
Yang struggled to readjust to being home after nearly five months in ICE detention facilities, he told The Detroit News in his first extended interview since his release.
“I feel like I’m still recovering from it. It still feels kind of surreal, in a way, to really be out,” Lue said.
“I remember my first night coming home, I just didn’t want to sleep, because you didn’t want to have to wake up and still be detained.”
ICE had shuffled Yang between facilities in Michigan, Louisiana, Texas and Arizona, sometimes without access to showers or laundry, wearing the same street clothes for two or three weeks, he said. Food was scarce at some sites, Yang said, and he lost eight or nine pounds in one week.
The days passed slowly with Lue pacing around his locked cell, feeling like “there was no light at the end of the tunnel,” and that he’d never get back to Michigan and his family, he said.
Lue was a friend to the other immigrants he was with, Ann said, helping them to contact family members and serving as something of a leader in the facility, especially for young detainees.
“They would literally follow him in the staging center because he made them feel safe. Even if they weren’t Southeast Asian or Hmong, he made them feel safe,” Ann said.
He was given scant details from officials on his detention status or transfers. He only knew his flight was headed back to Michigan in November when the landscape outside his window changed from green to white.
Yang and about a dozen other ethnically Hmong residents were arrested in July in Michigan on criminal convictions dating back decades — in Yang’s case, from 1997.
Laos had long declined to take back repatriated refugees like Yang, whose family had fled persecution by the Laotian government in 1975 after his father helped the U.S. during the Vietnam War.
The situation seemed to change this spring, when immigration advocates say the Trump administration began targeting Hmong communities. Over 400 Southeast Asian refugees have been deported to nations including Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia this year, and many more detained, said Aisa Villarosa, a Royal Oak attorney with the Asian Law Caucus, a legal and civil rights organization.
The shift occurred around the same time as Trump’s partial travel ban in June, which listed Laos, citing national security concerns. The Laos Embassy did not respond to questions.
“For Lue and particularly the Hmong community, they have zero connection to Laos, other than historic persecution,” Villarosa said.
The Hmong are an ethnic group that migrated from southern China to northern Laos centuries ago. During the Vietnam conflict, the CIA trained thousands of Hmong soldiers to fight against communism and the North Vietnamese in what’s known as the “Secret War” in Laos.
Yang’s father, Lo Yang, was among them, fighting alongside U.S. soldiers from 1969-72 before he was wounded by a grenade that exploded while loading an American pilot into an aircraft, his family said.
“They thought he was deceased because they already put him in a body bag and they (had) flown him back to his village that he was from,” Lue said of his father.
“It wasn’t until they unloaded him and then opened the body bag when the family was mourning that they noticed he was gaining consciousness again.”
Lo Yang returned to fight on behalf of the U.S. again from 1974-75, before fleeing the new Lao communist regime under fear of retaliation for his alliance with the U.S. The family ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand, where Lue was born in 1978, later resettling in the U.S. when Lue was nearly 2.
28-year-old crime
Growing up in Michigan, Lue Yang struggled to fit in with other kids. He said he faced bullying and racism as a teenager. So he and some Hmong buddies banded together to protect one another — but later got into trouble with the law.
Lue, then 19, stayed in the car while his friends broke into an empty home and took some items, he said.
“I told them pretty much I didn’t want to go, but since I was there, I would just sit in the car,” Lue recalled.
They got caught. Lue was charged with attempted home invasion in the second degree, a felony. After a plea deal, he served 10 months in jail.
He went on to rebuild his life, working for an auto supplier and rising to serve as president of the Hmong Family Association of Lansing, a nonprofit that provides services and programming to the Hmong community in mid-Michigan, which numbers 430 people. His six children with Ann are aged 7 to 24.
His criminal record was expunged in 2018 under state law, but that didn’t affect his immigration case. The plea deal cost him the green card that had provided his legal immigration status in the U.S. since his family’s arrival in 1979.
An order of final removal was entered into his immigration file in 2002; however, because Laos wasn’t accepting deportees from the U.S., immigration officials ordered him to check in quarterly with ICE agents in Detroit, who renewed his work permit for 25 years, he said.
His workplace is where masked ICE agents showed up unannounced early in the morning on July 15 to arrest him. He called Ann to share the news around 6:30 a.m., telling her the agents were dropping off his bicycle at their home and letting him say goodbye.
Ann woke up the kids, who sleepily shuffled to the end of the driveway to hug their father.
The older two boys rushed to grab cash from the house for Lue’s commissary account, then the agents took him behind their vehicle to cuff him out of the view of the children, Ann said.
“You just can’t believe that it’s happening,” she said. ”It took me, I think, a whole day before I even said anything to his siblings and his parents.”
Bipartisan push for release
The ICE crackdown in July seemed to hit the Hmong community all at once, said state Rep. Mai Xiong, the first Hmong American elected to the Michigan House.
“I’m not sure why Lue was taken first, but I think they had been surveilling him for some time and that he was on their radar,” said Xiong, who is not related to Lue’s lawyer. “They knew that he was a community leader.”
The Hmong rallied to build support for Lue’s freedom, alerting state lawmakers and members of the congressional delegation. Working with Lue’s legal team, the elected officials pursued two long-shot strategies: A court-based push to vacate Lue’s 1997 conviction and a plea to Whitmer to grant him a pardon.
The team recognized that pardons are rare and an option not readily adopted by the governor’s team because of the precedent it might set, Xiong said.
The push to free Lue got a boost when first-term GOP U.S. Rep. Barrett ― a supporter of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown ― decided to intervene on Lue’s behalf. An Army veteran who served in Iraq, Barrett was “very sympathetic” to the cause under which Lue came to the U.S., he said. Plus, Lue’s one-time crime was non-violent, he added.
“I can totally foresee a way in which someone is in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong crowd of people as a teenager and gets swept up into something that they shouldn’t be doing,” Barrett said.
“If we’re enforcing immigration law — which is something I do believe needs to be done and handled appropriately — this case really didn’t strike the nail on the head of things that I thought we ought to be focusing our immigration efforts around,” Barrett added.
“Lue Yang isn’t and hasn’t ever been an illegal immigrant, nor does he present a physical threat or risk to our community.”
Barrett’s office had regular conversations with agency officials at ICE, the Department of Homeland Security and the White House about Lue’s case. Barrett himself worked his way up to an acting assistant secretary on the phone, he said.
As the date of Lue’s possible deportation approached in October, Barrett drove to the ICE Detroit Field Office to personally meet with leaders and urge a higher-level review, he said.
That effort did not succeed, with Lue being loaded onto the deportation flight the following day. With the plane in the air, Barrett said he went to bed that night lamenting that they had maybe lost Lue.
“I actually told my wife that, you know, that really didn’t sit well with me,” Barrett told The News.
When Barrett awoke to learn Lue was still on U.S. soil, he and his team redoubled efforts to get him off the flight, he said.
“That’s when I worked some other angles of advocacy, and he was ultimately removed,” Barrett said.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in a statement, called Lue a “public safety threat” who could now be eligible for a green card as a result of Whitmer’s pardon.
“Thanks to Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s pardon of this criminal illegal alien and his prior conviction for home invasion, ICE was forced to halt his imminent removal,” the DHS statement said.
“Gretchen Whitmer REFUSED to protect Michiganders and instead sided with this criminal illegal alien. President Trump and Secretary Noem will continue to put the safety of Americans first.”
A Whitmer spokeswoman defended the pardon last week, noting the bipartisan efforts of state and federal leaders to get Lue home to his family, including the work by Barrett.
“Governor Whitmer granted a pardon for Lue Yang, a devoted family man and respected leader in Michigan’s Hmong community, to help reunite him with his loved ones,” Whitmer spokeswoman Stacey LaRouche said in a statement.
‘A target on my back’
Xiong, a Warren Democrat, expressed frustration with the Trump administration’s focus on the Hmong community.
“If the intent is to detain and deport the worst of the worst criminal, illegal aliens, I know these individuals came here legally, lawfully, just like I did,” Xiong said.
After the Vietnam War, Xiong’s family spent four years hiding in the jungle before crossing into a refugee camp in Thailand. Xiong was born there in 1984 before her family resettled in the U.S. in 1987.
Lue holds no citizenship in any country and, if deported, is at risk of statelessness, said Villarosa of the Asian Law Caucus.
She pointed to Wa Kong Lor, a Hmong refugee from outside Detroit deported in August to Laos. There, he’s considered stateless and living on the streets, unable to find housing, a job or to even open a bank account to receive money from his family in the U.S., the Guardian reported this fall.
Given Lue’s advocacy on behalf of Hmong veterans who allied with the U.S., he fears that he’d be tracked down and perhaps jailed if deported to Laos, he said.
“I felt like that would have put a target on my back if I went back,” Lue said. “I was really worried.”
Despite his pardon, Lue remains in legal limbo. The next fight is over restoring his legal immigration status, said Nancy Xiong, his attorney.
A motion filed in Clinton County Circuit Court asks a judge to vacate Lue’s 1997 plea deal, arguing it should be set aside in part because Lue was never told of the collateral consequences it would have on his immigration status. A hearing has been set for Feb. 3.
State Rep. Penelope Tsernoglou, an East Lansing Democrat who represents Lue in the Legislature, set up a meeting between his lawyer and Clinton County Prosecutor Tony Spagnuolo earlier this year in an attempt to gain his support to vacate the conviction.
Spagnuolo has not agreed to the request to vacate, according to Lue’s lawyers. But there’s precedent in other states for the ruling they’re seeking, said Tsernoglou, a former criminal defense attorney.
“He pled guilty … but didn’t receive the information that he should have received, which was that it would impact his ability to ever become a citizen,” Tsernoglou said.
Vacating the 1997 conviction could give the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals cause to reopen Lue’s immigration case, allowing his lawyers the chance to argue to reinstate his legal status, Xiong said.
The decision to reopen Lue’s case, however, is up to the discretion of the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), and Villarosa said she’s seen immigrants with similarly strong cases to Lue’s get denied due to a variety of factors, including political pressure.
“I believe we have a good chance of winning our argument with the BIA,” Xiong said. “And, if so, Lue will now have a pathway to citizenship.”
