UMN alum covered the front lines during Operation Metro Surge
As a Hmong American journalist with Sahan Journal, Katelyn Vue faced multiple challenges while chronicling her community.
When Katelyn Vue graduated from the University of Minnesota with a journalism degree in 2022, her classes had not taught her how to put on a gas mask. But that was just one of the many skills Vue had to learn on the job.
Nothing could have prepared the Hmong American journalist, who was covering immigration for Sahan Journal, for December when she began to document the impacts of Operation Metro Surge for an immigrant audience deeply affected by her reports.
“Covering ICE is just like a whole different set of skills that you have to learn,” Vue said. “There’s not an education journalism class, there’s not an immigration, federal enforcement class. Like in journalism, you have to learn a lot by just going out to experience it.”
Sahan’s executive director, Vanan Murugesan, confirmed the Sahan newsroom went into overdrive to serve its audience. Sahan is a local digital news outlet in the Twin Cities that focuses on covering the stories of Minnesota’s immigrants and communities of color.
“For a long period of time, over six to eight weeks, we produced three times the amount of content we normally produced,” Murugesan said.
Murugesan said Vue rose to the occasion of covering Operation Metro Surge.
Vue’s work at Sahan
During the surge, Vue’s stories were posted almost daily on Sahan’s website. She covered how BIPOC-run tow companies offered discounted pricing for people whose vehicles were abandoned due to ICE arrests. She wrote about two people’s traumatic observations while inside the Whipple Federal Building after they were arrested while observing ICE.
On Jan. 7, the day Renee Good was shot by a federal agent, she wrote three stories.
Vue said those months felt like a blur, as if there was so much to do. Especially after the deaths of Good and Alex Pretti, she faced nights when it was difficult to sleep.
Before Operation Metro Surge, she said, covering immigration meant focusing on the everyday lives of the immigrant community. The surge introduced a whole new level of understanding policy and accessing public records.
Vue began covering immigration as a full-time reporter for Sahan Journal in September 2024. Two months later President Donald Trump was elected for his second term as president of the United States.
Chao Xiong, the editorial director of Sahan, said Vue was asked to take over the beat because the editors believed in her ability to find compelling experience-centered stories.
Vue found ways to go beyond the everyday breaking news stories and reports of people being detained, Xiong said. He highlighted Vue’s stories about Latino grocers delivering food to people afraid to leave their homes and another story about a former ICE agent who now works with immigration attorneys to keep people in the U.S.
“She gave us a fuller picture of what was happening,” Xiong said.
Before Vue worked as a full-time reporter at Sahan, she freelanced for the publication a few times. Xiong said it was clear to the team that Vue was someone they wanted.
“So we did kind of follow her through her college career and then graduation, and she interned at the [Minnesota Star Tribune], and then we hired her after that ended,” Xiong said.
Love for writing and community
Vue’s passion for writing goes back to her time growing up in East St. Paul among a tight-knit Hmong community. Vue said she always knew she wanted a career involving writing.
“I knew that since I was a kid, so I just tried to do everything I could to be a better storyteller and be a better writer,” she said.
When she was a sophomore in high school, she discovered ThreeSixty Journalism, a nonprofit program run out of St. Thomas University in St. Paul that aims to equip young Minnesotans to tell their communities’ stories through writing.
She participated in their college essay bootcamp and met a Hmong journalist, Bao Vang. It was the first time she had met someone who was Hmong and in journalism, and Vang became a role model for her.
As Vue continued to learn about journalism, she realized it combined her passions for writing and uplifting communities, especially communities of color.
“And I was lucky, because I had someone Hmong who could show me how they did it,” Vue said.
The support from the ThreeSixty staff gave her confidence that she could pursue journalism as a career, she said. During her junior year at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, she began working at the university’s student newspaper, the Minnesota Daily. She also had several internships at APM Reports.
Before ending up at Sahan, Vue continued as a reporting intern at the Minnesota Star Tribune, focusing on covering communities of color. That work was suddenly valued, she said.
“At the time that I was coming up in my career was at the same time these newsrooms were opening their eyes that they wanted more of it [coverage of communities of color],” Vue said.
A different kind of trauma
Vue said she did not truly understand the impacts of covering Operation Metro Surge beyond the fatigue she felt from the volume of work. She began to understand the personal effect ICE activity was having on her as a journalist of color when she encountered reports of agents racially profiling people.
“As a member of the Hmong community, and seeing that happen in your own community is something different,” Vue said. “I don’t know how to explain, but it causes a different level of trauma in a personal life that I don’t feel like everyone in journalism goes there.”
She said covering the surge made it hard to separate her work self from her personal self, despite advice she received from some journalists.
“There are times where I felt like my life was in danger; I had to put on gas masks, and I had to think about my personal safety, and that’s when it’s hard to compartmentalize,” Vue said.
Gaining perspective
Through the surge, family connections grounded Vue and allowed her to disconnect a bit from her tumultuous experiences, she said. Beyond being a journalist, Vue is an aunt to two nieces, who are 1 and 2 years old, and visiting them was a breath of fresh air for her.
She also found time to sit outside despite the cold — a practice she said helped her realize that life goes on.
She also learned that multiple parts of her needed attention.
“There’s work me, and there’s also auntie me, and someone who likes to check out different coffee shops, and those are parts of me as well,” Vue said. “So just trying to remember those other pieces helps me kind of be able to get a sense of perspective, versus just kind of feeling like you have to constantly be working.”
