Hmong Seek Exemption From Food Stamp Cuts

In a provocative playback of the bloodiest years of the Vietnam War, hundreds of impoverished Hmong refugees argued in hearing rooms throughout California last week that service in the CIA’s secret army in Laos should save them from food stamp cuts mandated by welfare reform.

But state officials, after behind-the-scenes consultations with the Clinton administration, began rejecting the appeals, contending that Congress had provided no legal avenue to exempt former Hmong fighters and their families from the cuts.

“Unfortunately, while we empathize with this population, Congress made no specific provisions to allow them to continue receiving food stamps,” said Corinne Chee, a state Department of Social Services official.

The Hmong were among an estimated 100,000 legal immigrants in California slated to be cut off from food stamps Sept. 1 under the 1996 federal welfare reform act, which made noncitizens ineligible. The law made exceptions for those immigrants who were U.S. veterans or could prove they had worked 10 years in this country.

The cutoffs evoked an angry response from the Hmong, prompting over 3,500 to file appeals and forcing the department to quickly schedule mass hearings in Fresno, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Yuba, Alameda, Butte, San Joaquin and Orange counties. Officials have no statistics on the total number of Hmong who lost their food stamps but estimates run as high as 20,000.

In halting English, they insisted they were entitled to veteran status because they had spilled their blood for the American CIA in Laos. They told what one administrative law judge called “emotional and heart-wrenching” stories of leaving wives and children to fight for the Americans, of losing loved ones in the war and then, when it was over, of harrowing escapes from the communist victors.

“There was a promise [that] if we lost the war, the United States was going to take care of us,” said Yee Xiong, spokesman for the California Statewide Lao Hmong Coalition. “These people are just basically trying to survive and now they are being cut off from food stamps.”

The plight of the Hmong reopens a disquieting chapter in U.S. history and reignites the debate over how far this country should go to fulfill its obligations to native peoples who were recruited to fight in its wars.

It also illustrates some of the pitfalls in the welfare reform law designed to push recipients into the workplace and encourage legal immigrants to obtain citizenship.

In the hearings, the Hmong brought tattered evidence of the services their families provided the CIA during the turbulent 1960s, when America was waging a secret war that for nearly a decade helped keep the Communist North Vietnamese from making Laos its highway to South Vietnam.

One man brought the death certificates of 40 relatives he said had perished fighting in the American war. A woman had a yellowed photograph showing men in fatigues surrounding a helicopter.

“That’s my husband,” she told an administrative law judge, pointing to one of the figures.

The food stamp cuts apply to adults between 18 and 65. Although no longer eligible for federal food stamps, children and the elderly can continue to get assistance through a state program.

The Hmong immigrated to this country beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s after fleeing to Thailand to escape persecution as U.S. sympathizers. About half of the 150,000 Hmong now living in this country settled in California; most of the rest migrated to Minnesota and Wisconsin.

For many of the Hmong who were illiterate in their own language, the inability to master English has been an insurmountable barrier to citizenship. And the lack of marketable skills and their tendency to live in rural areas where jobs are scarce have kept most of the adults out of the workplace.

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Congress suggested in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 that it was not its intent to deny benefits to the Hmong who had fought for the CIA. Inserted in the act was the statement: “It is the sense of the Congress that Hmong . . . who fought on behalf of the armed forces of the United States during the Vietnam conflict . . . should be considered veterans for purpose of continuing certain welfare benefits.”

But the Clinton and Wilson administrations have taken the position that the statement has no force of law.

“It was the consensus that this language was not binding at all and really basically had no effect,” Chee said. “It is a very confusing and misleading statement and in our opinion has no substantive effect.”

She noted that the statement does not specify what types of benefits should be preserved, nor the definition of a veteran.

Lawyers for the Hmong complain that the two administrations have chosen a hard-line approach to the Hmong when they could have used the congressional statement as authority for granting exemptions from the cuts.

“Certainly a sense of Congress is not as binding as something that says ‘you must do this,’ but it is clear legislative direction to an agency,” said Jayne Park, staff attorney for the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium. “The fact that they haven’t chosen that option is really very troubling.”

One of the state’s administrative law judges who conducted several of the hearings agreed with her reasoning and found in favor of Hmong in a series of proposed orders. Judge Bruce Yurman said Congress could have been silent on the issue but the statement regarding the Hmong showed that it considered them war veterans and intended to keep them eligible for food stamps.

However, he was overruled by Eloise Anderson, director of the state Department of Social Services. She found his ruling to be inconsistent with a U.S. Department of Agriculture directive “which concludes there is no specific authority to grant such veteran status to this group for food stamp program purposes.”

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Victor Hwang, staff attorney with the nonprofit Asian Law Caucus, said he is researching the law to determine if there are grounds for a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the Hmong. In the meantime, with volunteer help from UC Davis law students, he said his group is assisting the Hmong with their appeals of the cuts.

“The Hmong should have a special dispensation,” said Ernest Velasquez, former welfare director in Fresno County, home to the nation’s largest Hmong community. “The reality is, this wasn’t their war. We brought the war to them. We recruited them. We made them our secret army and now all of a sudden we aren’t even going to give them food stamps.”

It is an argument that the Hmong presented to the hearing examiners.

“I came to the United States because my father fought for the CIA. . . . My family supported the Americans,” one mother of seven said in a written statement. “As such, my family, like thousands of other Hmong, could not remain in Laos. . . . We were targeted to be persecuted and massacred.”

Another told of the hardships of adjusting to life in America. “I was a farmer for most of my life and worked with my bare hands. I have never asked anyone for assistance,” an interpreter wrote for one man. “Now I have to depend on my children for everything such as translating, shopping or going anywhere. My children are my parent and I am their child.”