ICYMI: ICE Agents Force Elderly US Citizen Outside In His Underwear
If there is no truth to the notion that immigration agents deployed by the Trump administration are terrorizing communities, and profiling and detaining non-white people, whether they’re U.S. citizens or not, then why is there no shortage of incidents in which agents have engaged in unprovoked violence, racial profiling, warrantless arrests and the dehumanizing of Black and brown people, many of whom have turned out to be U.S. citizens.
On Monday, federal immigration agents detained U.S. citizen ChongLy “Scott” Thao after forcing their way into his Minnesota home at gunpoint and without a warrant. The agents then led the elderly man out onto the streets in his underwear in subfreezing conditions, and they kept him out there freezing with barely any clothes on until they were satisfied that he was not an undocumented migrant, or whoever they claimed to be there looking for.
From CBS News:
ChongLy “Scott” Thao told the AP that his daughter-in-law woke him up from a nap Sunday afternoon and said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were banging at the door of his residence in St. Paul. He told her not to open it. Masked agents then forced their way in and pointed guns at the family, yelling at them, Thao recalled.
“I was shaking,” he said. “They didn’t show any warrant; they just broke down the door.”
Amid a massive surge of federal agents into the Twin Cities, immigration authorities are facing backlash from residents and local leaders for warrantless arrests, aggressive clashes with protestors and the fatal shooting of mother of three Renee Good.
“ICE is not doing what they say they’re doing,” St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her, a Hmong American, said in a statement about Thao’s arrest. “They’re not going after hardened criminals. They’re going after anyone and everyone in their path. It is unacceptable and un-American.”
Thao, who has been a U.S. citizen for decades, said that as he was being detained, he asked his daughter-in-law to find his identification but the agents told him they didn’t want to see it.
Instead, as his 4-year-old grandson watched and cried, Thao was led out in handcuffs wearing only sandals and underwear with just a blanket wrapped around his shoulders.
Thao went on to say that agents drove him “to the middle of nowhere” and made him get out of the car in his underwear so they could photograph him. He said that was when they finally asked him for his ID, which, again, he said they previously refused to let him show. Thao said that the agents eventually realized he was a citizen, and an hour or two after that, they finally brought him back to his home.
As usual, the Department of Homeland Security is telling a different story, claiming that Thou was harboring the actual targets of the operation, who it claims are “convicted sex offenders,” and that Thou refused to cooperate with the agents.
“The US citizen lives with these two convicted sex offenders at the site of the operation,” DHS said. “The individual refused to be fingerprinted or facially ID’d. He matched the description of the targets.”
Really? He “matched the description,” huh?
DHS, on its official X account, responded to a post regarding Thao’s story by showing the mugshots of the “criminal illegal aliens” they were targeting — two men who are obviously significantly younger than Thao, and who look nothing like him, save the possibility that they are of the same race and nationality.
Apparently, DHS is relying on us to just ignore the fact that they already had the mugshots of the people they were looking for, and that its agents were warrantless, despite their targets supposedly being dangerous, violent offenders.
It’s also worth mentioning that, according to CBS, Thao’s family said in a statement that it “categorically disputes” the idea that Thao was associated with wanted sex offenders, and “strongly objects to DHS’s attempt to publicly justify this conduct with false and misleading claims.”
The DHS has claimed ad nauseam that President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown was about ridding the U.S. of the “worst of the worst” in “criminal illegal aliens,” but all we see are investigations and data that indicate the vast majority of those they are detaining and arresting are not convicted criminals. Yet, the government keeps leaning on the same lie in order to justify all of these countless incidents that involve federal agents behaving poorly and causing terror in communities.
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