CALIFORNIA IN BRIEF : FRESNO : Lao Agencies Deny Extortion Charges

Leaders of local Lao Family organizations in Fresno and Garden Grove have denied that their agencies are involved in “shakedowns” of ethnic Hmong refugees to fund a resistance movement in Laos. Officials of the Civil Rights Bureau of California’s Social Services Departments are recommending that funding of Lao Family refugee assistance programs throughout California be halted after an investigation in San Bernardino and Riverside counties revealed the assistance programs were involved in extortion and discrimination against Hmong refugees who don’t contribute to the anti-communist resistance movement in Laos. The resistance is headed by Gen. Vang Pao, a Hmong leader who lives in Garden Grove. The state contends Lao Family employees in San Bernardino County acted as “shakedown artists” for Vang Pao’s resistance movement, telling refugees they could not return to their ethnic homeland in the hill country of Laos unless they contributed to his cause. But Tony Vang, head of the Fresno Lao Family program, said the Social Services probe assumed “the Lao Family throughout the state is doing the same thing. That is not right. And they actually jeopardize their own position on civil rights. They are using one brush to brush everybody’s face.”