Minnesota state lawmaker revealed on Monday that she came to the United States “illegally.”
Democratic state Rep. Kaohly Vang Her made the announcement during a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives in the Minnesota state legislature.
She later clarified after her floor speech that she and her parents are U.S. citizens.
The Democratic lawmaker told Newsweek her parents took their citizenship test and that she became a citizen as a minor when she was in middle school.
“It’s incredibly disheartening that my floor speech—where I shared my family’s deeply personal immigration story—was twisted into anti-immigrant clickbait. {snip}
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“I am illegal in this country,” Her said in her speech as the chamber was debating House File 1, a proposal that would ban MinnesotaCare coverage for adult undocumented people in the U.S. MinnesotaCare provides healthcare to low-income Minnesotans.
“My family broke the law to come here. I never knew that. I just learned that,” she said. “My family was just smarter in how we illegally came here.”
Her said she recently learned that her family had not been eligible to enter the U.S. but that her parents found a way to do so by altering their immigration paperwork.
“The only people who [could] come to the U.S. were if you were the direct military, you worked for the CIA, or you worked for [the United States Agency For International Development], which is why it’s so personal to me that USAID is getting unfunded,” Her said.
“But we did not do either one of those,” she added. “My parents’ Christian organization did not count.”
“And so what my father did was, one of our uncles worked for USAID, and because his mother had died, my father, as the one processing the paperwork, put my grandmother down as his mother,” the Democratic lawmaker said. “And so I am illegal in this country. My parents are illegal here in this country.”
Her’s online biography says that she was born in Laos and came to the U.S. as a refugee when she was 4 years old. She said Monday that her family left Laos after the Vietnam War.
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Her urged her Republican colleagues to consider her background when voting on whether to remove MinnesotaCare coverage for undocumented adults in the state.
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