Hmong Americans’ lawsuit alleges racist treatment by California sheriff

KRCR PHOTO

Hmong Americans protest attempt to restrict water deliveries to their properties in California.

Hmong residents of Siskiyou County in California filed a civil rights lawsuit Monday against the County Sheriff alleging "a sweeping campaign to harass and intimidate Hmong and other Asian Americans."

"In 2022, as more and more people are reckoning with systemic racism in our country, Siskiyou County officials are choosing to create a humanitarian crisis, persecute Hmong Americans and Asian Americans, and create divisions among neighbors,” said Emi Young, staff attorney at the ACLU Foundation of Northern California. 

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California has filed a civil rights lawsuit against Siskiyou County and its sheriff on behalf of members of the Hmong community. The complaint seeks to hold Siskiyou officials accountable for their alleged systematic racial targeting and for the violation of Asian Americans’ US and California constitutional rights, including an order prohibiting Siskiyou County and Sheriff LaRue from engaging in race, color, and ethnicity-based discrimination with safeguards to ensure that such discrimination does not continue in the future. 

The plaintiffs are represented by the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Asian Law Caucus, and Covington & Burling LLP.

Siskiyou County is far from
California's urban centers.

The county has struggled for years to rein in an explosion of cannabis grows in areas like Mount Shasta Vista, many of which are owned by the Hmong. Although growing is permitted for personal use, commercial cultivation is banned in Siskiyou.

The complaint alleges that county officials “view Asian Americans as a monolithic group of which every single person is part of a violent drug cartel and blame the County’s widespread cannabis cultivation on Asian Americans in explicitly racialized terms, notwithstanding that cannabis has been grown in the County for decades,” according to the complaint.

The complaint cites former Sheriff Jon Lopey comparing the fight against illegal cannabis to war in a foreign country. The complaint also cites remarks made by Siskiyou County Supervisor Ray Haupt in a July 2020 email to a colleague in which he compared the situation to Sharia Law, referring to Islamic law based on the writings of the Quran, Islam's holy book. The majority of Hmong are not Muslims.

The situation involving Hmong farms has devolved into “complete lawlessness,” Haupt wrote. “I am fearful that we are losing a portion of our county and being turned into a no go zone, similar to what we see in foreign countries like Europe where Sharia Law has replaced local governance.”

As the complaint details, Siskiyou County officials and Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue have made their intentions explicit in public meetings and documents, characterizing Asian Americans as people “who thumb their nose at our society, at our way of life” and singling out “the Hmong residents” at a Board of Supervisors meeting before asking for a vote of “those County residents present.” 

The Sheriff’s Department targets Asian American drivers at a rate 12 times greater than the Asian American driving-age population. 

At the same time, as the region faces hotter temperatures and more extreme wildfires, Siskiyou County officials have created a humanitarian crisis that disproportionately deprives Asian American residents of water needed for health and hygiene and to protect themselves and their homes from wildfires.

“Like many of our neighbors, my husband, my son, and I love the beauty of Siskiyou County and want to enjoy a safe, healthy life with our friends and family,” said Mai Nou Vang, one of the Hmong American plaintiffs in the case who owns property in the area. 

“Last year, my family and I were driving outside of Shasta Vista and were stopped by two sheriff’s deputies," said Vang. "For a half hour, we were questioned about what we were doing and where we had come from. They searched our car without a warrant, and then finally let us go with a ticket to fix a light cover. My story isn’t unique. So many of my Asian neighbors have been stopped like this by the police while we try to go about our days, run errands, and visit loved ones.”

Rural Siskiyou County, located along California's border with Oregon, is home to fewer than 45,000 people, of whom 85% are white and 1.6% are Asian American, according to the latest US Census. Residents, most of whom are registered Republican, have attempted unsuccessfully to secede from the state to form a new state to be called Jefferson.

Many Asian American residents in Siskiyou County are Hmong and came to the US. as refugees after fighting alongside the US government in the Vietnam War. The Hmong, most of whom were farmers in their homeland, have bought land, which is relatively inexpensive in the rocky and mountainous county. 

The lawsuit filed with the Eastern District Court of California details the findings of a year-long investigation into the county’s disturbing treatment of Asian American residents, including interviews with community members, public records requests, and review of thousands of Board of Supervisors and Sheriff Department documents.

• Over 28% of traffic stops conducted by the Sheriff’s Department in 2021 were of Asian American drivers. The department stops drivers of Asian descent at a rate nearly 12 times greater than their proportion of the driving-age population.

• An Asian American in Siskiyou County is about 17 times more likely to be pulled over by the Sheriff’s Department than a white individual, and the median stop length for Asian American drivers was 56% longer than for other drivers.

• The Sheriff’s Department stops Asian Americans during the day, when a driver’s race is more readily visible, at a nearly 60% higher rate than at night.

• Several water ordinances have created a humanitarian crisis that severely impacts Asian American residents, particularly in Shasta Vista, Dorris, and Macdoel. While a judge recently issued a preliminary injunction against two of the ordinances, the county’s measures have collectively degraded community members’ health, resulted in the loss of livestock and gardens, left people unable to fend off wildfires, and forced many to leave their homes in the past year.

• Over 80% of property liens issued by the county have been issued against Asian American residents, many of which are more than double the assessed property value.

Siskiyou County dominated by forests and mountains.

“Since more Hmong residents began moving to Siskiyou County in 2015, county officials and Sheriff LaRue have orchestrated a sweeping campaign to push out the Asian American community,” said the ACLU's Young.

Earlier this year, a federal judge in Sacramento affirmed that the preliminary injunction for two of the discriminatory water ordinances must stay in place after the county attempted to end the injunction. In her ruling, the judge wrote that “the passage of time has erased neither the concerning language County officials used to describe their purposes nor the racial animosity Hmong people in Shasta Vista have faced.”

“We are a group of people who came to the United States in the late 70s as refugees because of our involvement in helping the U.S. during the Vietnam War. Many of us have since moved to Siskiyou County because we love the landscape and rural nature of the region,” said Peter Thao, Hmong community member in Siskiyou County. 

“We want to build a good rapport with the community here and the local government," Thao continued. "Hmong people are very family oriented. We are not here to cause hardship or burden to this community. I would like to see our communities understand each other better. If the local government would give us a seat at the table, we could work together to build a better relationship between our communities.”

Members of the ACLU cite that “Sharia Law” comment as further evidence of county officials’ racial animus and motivations.

The ACLU says county logs demonstrate “widespread racial profiling in traffic stops,” in the county, as well as concerted effort “to dispossess Asian Americans of their land.”

EDITOR'S NOTE: For additional commentary, news and views from an AANHPI perspective, follow @DioknoEd on Twitter.