In a jaw-dropping speech, Minnesota State Representative Kaohly Vang Her apparently confessed that she is “illegal to this country” while telling a story about how her family came to the United States as part of a push for state legislation that would allow illegal aliens in Minnesota to receive publicly funded healthcare.
For context, while voicing her support for a proposed modification to Minnesota state legislation, State Rep. Kaohly Vang Her, a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, said that she had recently learned that her entire family entered the United States illegally, recounting the story of their emigration from Laos to prove a point.
Speaking on the State House floor, Rep. Vang Her explained that she wanted to “put a face to the name,” adding that by telling her story, she aimed to put “a face to what it is that we are doing today.” She continued, ” I asked my father about how we came to the United States, and I always thought we came here because my grandfather was a colonel in the Secret War.”
However, Rep. Vang Her explained that while she thought that her family had come into the United States legally, she learned from her father recently that “that was not true.” She added, “Even though my parents both worked for a Christian organization, and my father actually worked at the U.S. Consulate because he was one of the few people who could speak English, and he could type really fast, and apparently that was a very valued skill then.”
Next, the state representative detailed how her father “went to live at the consulate where he processed all of the paperwork for the refugees that came to America,” adding, “And we had missed our time to come to the U.S. three times and if we didn’t come that last time, we would not have been able to come to the U.S.” However, Rep. Vang Her explained that her mother had told her that her family’s arrival in the U.S. “wasn’t luck,” that instead, her father had defrauded the U.S. government.
Continuing, the state representative said that her father filled out his family’s paperwork incorrectly on purpose, explaining, “One of our uncles worked for USAID and because his mother had died, my father was the one processing the paperwork, put my grandmother down as his mother and so I am illegal in this country, my parents are illegal here in this country.”
Adding to the complicated nature of the story, the representative clarified, “And when we were fleeing that situation, never one time did my family say, ‘Let’s look at which state has the greatest welfare and which state has the greatest benefits because that’s the state we’re going to go to.’” She then added that she was telling the story “so that you think about who it is that you’re calling illegal.”
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Continuing, Rep. Vang Her said that her family “just smarter in how we illegally came here,” adding, “We had more privileges and more abilities in how we came here in that way … when you think about those people, think about me, my family broke the law to come here, you’re thinking about me.”
Watch the representative’s story:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video