The Moua family arrived in the cold April of 1976 at the Eau Claire, Wisconsin airport. They were unprepared for the weather but greeted by the warm welcome of the pastors sponsoring their stay in the United States. It was one year after the end of the Vietnam War that forced them to flee their country.
“They had very little,” Mary Schoenknecht said. “Even the little ones didn’t have any shoes,”
Schoenknecht works to keep records at Trinity Lutheran Church in Eau Claire. The church sponsored the first few Hmong families that came to Eau Claire. First the Moua family, and two years later the Vue family.
Freeman Vue was 17 when he landed here in 1978. He’s lived in Eau Claire ever since – like most of his family. The Pastors Andy Bow and Jack Olson picked them up the same as the first family where they took the photos kept at the Trinity Lutheran library to this day.
“My dad was in The Secret War and in Vietnam between the north and south,” Vue said. “The Americans were helping hide the Laos people, carrying weapons and sending soldiers to the south. My dad was a soldier at that time and he was killed.”
Their father’s death left a huge impact on their family as they moved to escape the repercussions of one of their family siding with the US in The Secret War, a CIA covert operation in Laos focused on cutting off supplies to communist forces in Vietnam.
“The Americans promised if we helped them and we couldn’t stay in Laos, they would support us, and all the communists were torturing the Hmong soldiers helping the Americans,” Vue said. “We escaped from Laos to Thailand, stayed there for a couple years and then the Americans found sponsors.”
When American forces withdrew from Laos in 1975 leaving thousands running to Thailand refugee camps, Hmong families started arriving in the US as refugees. Today, about 4.5% of the global Hmong population lives in the US, with a little over 3,000 in the City of Eau Claire.
Freeman Vue doesn’t remember the details of his family’s story specifically. Their family passes down the story of their journey to Eau Claire, but since Jan. 20, 2025, stories like that haven’t been happening.
An executive order Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program signed by President Donald Trump has halted all inflow of refugees since Jan. 20, 2025.
The order reads, “The United States lacks the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees, into its communities in a manner that does not compromise the availability of resources for Americans, that protects their safety and security, and that ensures the appropriate assimilation of refugees.”
The act canceled the flights of 22,000 refugees who had been previously approved according to published State Department statistics released by CBS News on January 28, 2025. That includes flights that were bound for Eau Claire, sponsored by World Relief.
World Relief Wisconsin is a Christian non-profit organization with an office downtown. Recently opened towards the end of 2023, the Chippewa Valley expansion of the Christian nonprofit group was a continuation of the Wisconsin branch of national networks that has helped place over 400,000 refugees in the US.
The executive order also issued a stop work order, which means that under the federal reception and placement program, resettlement agencies are no longer able to serve or provide resources with federal funding. Gail Cornelius, regional director for World Relief Wisconsin, said it’s a frustrating situation.
“That’s also for refugees that have already arrived in our community,” Cornelius said. “And that’s challenging because it means that we have folks that we are working with, that we have welcomed, that we are no longer able to serve under that same grant.”
Professor Kati Barahona-Lopez works at UW-Eau Claire in the Latin American studies and sociology programs. She said, that in the context of refugees in the United States, it’s important to remember the historical impact executive orders have had on immigration in general.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943 – just a few decades before Hmong people came to the US. The act banned Chinese people from entering the US, and many Asian people faced societal exclusion as a result.
“Just a few years before it happened the Hmong resettlement programs in the United States would not have been able to happen,” Barahona-Lopez said. “Folks from the Hmong community are such an integral part of Eau Claire, and this is home for them now.“
The executive order defunding refugee programs and refusing refugee entry into the country is a delivered-on promise that President Trump emphasized on the campaign trail in Wisconsin where immigration was ranked the second most important issue to Wisconsin voters by a Marquette University poll.
“I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion,” Trump said in a campaign speech at Prairie Du Chien on Sept. 28, 2024. “Every state is a border state.”
It’s a sentiment shared by the people who protested the opening of World Relief in September. Fred Kappus from the Eau Claire Republican Party was at those protests and holds concerns about the results of refugee settlement in Willmar, Minnesota being repeated here in Eau Claire.
“Willmar, Minnesota is my mother’s hometown, and I still have relatives who live in the Willmar area,” Kappus said. “One of my cousins said that Willmar is a city of approximately 22,000 people, and 20% of the population now are Somalis.”
Despite holding a population that is one third non-white in 2019, tensions around increasing numbers of Somalian refugees entering Willmar kept rising. It led to members of the Kandiyohi County board voting to stop the program but they feared accusations of racism from the community.
“They do not assimilate whatsoever,” Kappus said. “It’s created all kinds of problems, social and economic problems in Wilmer, due to their non-assimilation.”
Concerned citizens like Kappus who protested World Relief in Eau Claire released a statement talking about their main issues with the opening of the office. Among them were lack of transparency, lack of public input and impacts on housing in Eau Claire.
Housing in Eau Claire is a strained topic with Western Dairyland publishing that, from January to July 2024, the total unhoused population increased to 104 people in the Eau Claire area, but Lisa Leazott from the Community Haven House said to the Spectator last winter that she estimates that number might have tripled since then.
“Shouldn’t we be taking care of homeless American citizens before we import people from the other side of the world and then have to take care of them too?” Kappus said.
Professor Barahona-Lopez said the link between homeless people and refugee programs is unintentional.
“From a sociological perspective the ways in which these narratives about immigration and housing and people’s needs. They all get linked together,” Barahona-Lopez said. “It’s interesting because a lot of times we think we’re making policy on one issue, and then we realize that it’s actually very interconnected with all these other issues.”
The refugees in Eau Claire settled by World Relief are not just supported by public programs and funding, but also religious organizations and volunteers called ‘Good Neighbor Teams’ from area churches – including Trinity Lutheran.
“It’s kind of a three-prong approach to our funding,” Cornelius said. “We have federal funding, we have state grant funding, and then we work with what we call locally raised funds but essentially private and foundation and church funding.”
World Relief has been supported by churches, individual donors, as well as federal grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other agencies. Under the administration of President Trump USAID has lost funding and staffing despite efforts of the Supreme Court.
With the executive order to stop work enabled, Good Neighbor teams in Eau Claire still provide support to refugee families. Madeline Kelley with The Haven, a church in Eau Claire, has been on a good neighbor team for the past few months helping a refugee family.
“It’s just making sure they have all the things they need: cleaning supplies, sheets, toys, things like that,” Kelley said. “Sometimes with other families, it’s a communal support like making meals for them or helping find a vehicle for them – filling out job applications. Just a lot of daily things.”
Kelley wasn’t affiliated with World Relief when protesters were against the office opening. She said she remembered seeing the protests and being confused.
“I remember thinking this is ridiculous,” Kelley said. “I’m sure the people who are protesting are misinformed or uninformed – that was my view before I was in the program – and now I think people are incredibly uninformed as they still have opposition to the program.”
It has been fifty years since the end of the Secret War that drove Hmong families as refugees to Eau Claire sponsored by Trinity Lutheran. Since then the Moua and Vue families have left a thumbprint on the area.
Judge Sophia Vue became the first Hmong Minnesota judge after graduating from Memorial High School in 1990 as homecoming queen. Charles Vue retired in 2022 from UW-Eau Claire after working at the Office of Multicultural Affairs and helping plant seeds for what is now the Critical Hmong Studies program.
Kappus, who protested the World Relief office, believes the Hmong refugees have since become pillars in Eau Claire.
“They are productive members of our community,” Kappus said. “And that was a very different situation than it is now, I believe. They’re fully invested throughout the community”
With Trinity Lutheran still supporting Good Neighbor Groups with World Relief, Schoenknecht likes to keep the photographs recording how the first Hmong families came to the Chippewa Valley.
Some of the photos are labeled with fun facts about the children. It’s similar to how Good Neighbor teams will receive information about the families they help today.
Schoenknecht is also friends with the pastors who spearheaded the Hmong sponsorship and members of the Vue family. They try to connect formally every couple of weeks, but Schoenknecht and Freeman Vue run into each other at the YMCA downtown often.
“I can tell you it’s not been easy for them because we are not a diverse community,” Schoeknecht said, “but they bring a richness to Eau Claire.”
Eau Claire holds multiple events that honor Hmong culture throughout the year. New Year’s, HmongFest, and Culture Fest are just a few. Freeman Vue mentioned that the Hmong Institute in Wisconsin is holding a 50th Anniversary Banquet in Madison this summer.
“Fifty years is a long time,” Professor Barahona-Lopez said. “it makes me wonder how many of us think about the historical factors that shaped Hmong folks coming to Eau Claire. I think about how little we remember these historical events that really push people to migrate.”
World Relief Wisconsin intends to operate despite the executive order passed on Jan. 20. They continue to rely on community volunteers to help the refugees currently settled in Eau Claire.
Pawlisch can be reached at [email protected].
