SACRAMENTO, Calif. (CN) — Nestled under the dominating silhouette of Mt. Shasta in northernmost California is a bustling community of Vietnam War refugees and Hmong-Americans seeking solitude in normally tranquil Siskiyou County. Hundreds of newly settled Hmong residents sought calm in the mountainous terrain, but many say they have collided with a sheriff hell-bent on restricting their voting and property rights.
Alleging systematic voter suppression in the June primary and subsequent racial profiling by Siskiyou County Sheriff Jon Lopey, 10 Hmong property owners sued the sheriff and Siskiyou County on Monday in Federal Court.
"I remember the panic and the fear in my clients' voices when they first called me," said their attorney Kyndra Miller, of San Francisco.
Among the refugees' claims are that the county rejected their voter registrations for lack of information — though the county has not issued many of their properties an address.
Jesse Vang and his nine co-plaintiffs say they have been subjected to threats from heavily armed plainclothes officers, and restrictive, racially motivated county laws aimed at Hmong residents.
Miller says the problems with the sheriff began when an influx of Hmong started buying undeveloped land in 2015. The Hmong families are attracted to the rural terrain because it reminds them of their homeland in Laos.
After partnering with U.S. troops during the Vietnam war, thousands of Hmong were killed or uprooted into refugee camps. Hundreds of thousands of refugees eventually resettled in the United States. Today the largest Hmong-American populations live in Northern California and Minnesota.
Rather than welcoming and incorporating the new residents into Siskiyou County, pop. 44,000, the plaintiffs say, the county quickly passed ordinances targeting "people of Hmong ethnicity."
With Lopey's support, Siskiyou County officials passed Local Ordinance SC 10-14 in 2015, calling it a marijuana cultivation law aimed at keeping outsiders from growing on unincorporated land. The ordinance requires homes to be connected to sewer or septic tanks as a prerequisite for occupancy or medical marijuana grows.
Most of the land the Hmong bought was in unincorporated areas without city or county sewer hookups. There are no known aquifers in the area, so drilling wells can be fruitless. And Siskiyou County has not assigned addresses to many of the newly purchased, two-acre plus lots.
Citing the timing of the ordinance, critics said it was meant to give Lopey "unfettered power" to target the new Hmong homeowners.
In June this year, Siskiyou County voters approved two more measures, declaring outdoor cultivation of medicinal marijuana a public nuisance.
Outdoor marijuana grows are common in Siskiyou County and the surrounding counties of Trinity, Modoc and Shasta. Northern California's legal medical marijuana business is a multibillion-dollar industry.
While Miller acknowledges that some of her clients grow medical marijuana, she says the new ordinances were passed to allow Lopey and his deputies to continue threatening and intimidating the new Hmong residents.
Miller's law based firm, CannaBusiness Law, is "committed to helping the medical marijuana patients of California form and operate not-for-profit, democratically controlled cannabis cooperatives," according to its website.
"Clearly, the intention of the defendants is to run the Hmong people out of the community. It seems to be a concerted effort to get rid of all these newcomers," Miller said in an interview.
Siskiyou County's population is 87 percent white, according to the U.S. Census.