MPR’s Nikki Tundel speaks with Erich Mische, the state director for U.S. Senator Norm Coleman, about a St. Paul high school student facing deportation. Tchisou Tho was scheduled for deportation just 22 days before he would have become the first in his family to graduate from high school, but won a delay that will allow him to graduate with his classmates in June.
Mische says he read about the Como Park student in the paper and forwarded the article to the senator. Mische says Coleman immediately introduced legislation to enable Tho to stay in the U-S while his citizenship application makes its way through Congress.
Members of the Tho family fled Laos in 1975, but because they settled in France before coming to the United States, they can't receive the same status as most Hmong refugees in Minnesota.