ST. PAUL, Minnesota, USA (AP) — Federal immigration agents forced entry through a door and detained a U.S. citizen in his Minnesota home at gunpoint without a warrant, then dragged him outside in his underwear despite subzero temperatures, according to his family and videos reviewed by The Associated Press.
ChongLy “Scott” Thao told AP that his daughter-in-law woke him from a Sunday afternoon nap and told him ICE agents were banging on the door of their St. Paul home. He told her not to answer. Masked agents forced their way in and leveled weapons at the family as they yelled, Thao recalled.
“I was shaking,” he said. “They didn’t show a warrant; they just knocked the door down.”
In the midst of a sweeping federal deployment in the Twin Cities, the metro area known as Minneapolis and St. Paul, immigration authorities are facing anger from neighbors and local leaders over warrantless arrests, confrontations with demonstrators, and the fatal shooting of Renee Good, a mother of three.
“ICE is not doing what they’re claiming to be doing,” said Kaohly Her, the St. Paul mayor, a U.S. citizen of Hmong origin, in a statement about Thao’s arrest. “They’re not chasing dangerous criminals. They’re going after anyone and everyone in their path. It’s unacceptable and un-American.”
Thao, who has been a U.S. citizen for decades, said that while detained he asked his daughter-in-law to fetch his identification, but the agents told him they did not want to see it.
Instead, as his four-year-old grandson watched and cried, Thao was escorted out in handcuffs, wearing only sandals and underwear, with a thin blanket draped over his shoulders.
Videos captured the scene, including people sounding whistles and horns and neighbors shouting at the more than a dozen armed agents to leave Thao’s family alone.
Thao said the agents drove him “to the middle of nowhere” and forced him to step from the car into the freezing air for a photo. He feared they would strike him. They asked for his ID, which the agents had previously prevented him from taking.
Eventually the agents realized he was a United States citizen with no criminal record, Thao said, and an hour or two later they returned him to his home. There they made him show his identification and then left without apologizing for detaining him or for breaking down his door, Thao added.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) described the ICE operation at Thao’s home as a “targeted operation” in search of two convicted sex offenders.
“The U.S. citizen lives with these two convicted sex offenders at the operation site,” DHS said. “The individual refused to be fingerprinted or subjected to facial recognition. He matched the description of the targets.”
Thao’s family stated in a release that they “categorically reject” the department’s account and “strongly oppose” the DHS’s attempt to publicly justify this conduct with false and misleading statements.
Thao told AP that only he, his son, his daughter-in-law and his grandson live in the rented home. Neither they nor the property owner are listed in Minnesota’s sex offender registry. The nearest sex offender listed as residing in the ZIP code lives more than two blocks away.
DHS did not respond to AP’s request to identify the “two convicted sex offenders” or to explain why the agency believed they were present at Thao’s home.
Thao’s son, Chris Thao, said ICE agents pulled him over as he drove to work before the raid on his father. He said he was driving a car borrowed from his cousin’s boyfriend. Court records show the boyfriend shares a first name with another Asian man who has a sex-offense conviction. Chris Thao said they are not the same person.
The family said they are especially upset about how ChongLy Thao was treated by the U.S. government because his mother had to flee Laos for the United States when the communists took power in the 1970s, after she had aided U.S. covert operations in the country and risked her life.
Thao’s adoptive mother, Choua Thao, was a nurse who treated CIA-backed Hmong soldiers during the U.S. government’s “Secret War” in Laos from 1961 to 1975, according to the Hmong Nurses Association’s website.
Choua Thao, who died in late December, “treated countless civilians and American soldiers, working closely with U.S. personnel,” wrote her daughter-in-law Louansee Moua on a GoFundMe page for the family.
ChongLy Thao says he plans to file a civil rights lawsuit against DHS and no longer feels safe sleeping in his own home.
“I don’t feel safe at all,” Thao said. “What did I do wrong? I did nothing.”
