veritenewsnola In July, Min Khant Zaw was flying back home to Louisiana from a West Coast vacation spent hiking Mount Rainer, seeing California’s giant sequoias with his grandmother, and visiting his grandfather at a Southern California hospital. It was a normal trip, until he was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. “Never have I ever imagined that I would be on one of the most beautiful trails in the world, the Wonderland Trail, and then going to see my grandparents, living life as a normal young person just to be arrested and shackled by ICE agents,” Zaw said. He spent seven weeks at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana before being released on Sept. 9 on a $40,000 bond. In 2019, Zaw, a computer science graduate researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, flew from Myanmar, also known as Burma, to the United States to attend a scientific conference in Texas. He planned to return to Myanmar after the conference and wait to apply for a visa through his aunt, who is a U.S. citizen. Then his parents called and told him to stay put. A new wave of violence against the Rohingya people was sweeping his community. His family, who are Rohingya activists and political dissidents, were afraid for his life. Zaw filed for asylum in 2020. Read more at veritenews.org View all comments