You can't hide your lying ICE
Documenting DHS lies about ICE and Border Patrol abuses: The illegal raid on ChongLy Scott Thao
I’m currently working on a new edition of my first book, Rise of the Warrior Cop. It will have an updated introduction, plus at least two — and likely three — new chapters that will bring the police militarization narrative through the Biden years up to the first 14 months or so of Trump’s second term.
My publisher and I thought a new edition was merited because, as I’ve written here and elsewhere, what we’re seeing right now is unprecedented. The conditions for the assault on policing norms, democratic values, and the Bill of Rights that we’ve seen over the last year were put in place over the last 50 years. It just took a president with the will to destroy all of those things.
It’s not just the abuse, beatings, killings, and trampling of constitutional rights, it’s the celebration of violence, the gleeful dehumanization of immigrants and those who defend them, and the utter contempt for any semblance of transparency, accountability, or the law.
For me, it became clear that we were in a uniquely dangerous era after the shooting of Marimar Martinez and the killing of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez in Chicago. I’m pretty jaded about these things, but I was jarred at how the administration openly gloated and shamelessly lied about the use of lethal force by DHS against people who posed no threat. It only got worse after the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. The lies the administration told after those killings aren’t the lies you tell to cover something up. They’re the lies you tell when you want to project to the country that you can get away with anything. The lies themselves are their own display of authoritarianism. The government is telling us, “You know we’re lying. We know that you know we’re lying. And there isn’t a goddamn thing you can do about it.”
But as I’ve looked into these cases at a more granular level while researching the new edition, I’ve been struck again by just how pervasive, depraved, and diabolical the lying has become. They lie about everything. When they’re caught in a lie, they lie again. They lie when the facts aren’t on their side, but also when they are. And they never, ever admit that they lied.
There’s no trace of solemnity or acknowledgment of the gravity of taking a human life. Nor has there been any shame, embarrassment, or basic humanity upon learning that the people they’ve killed, arrested, abused, or beaten were innocent. There are only layers and layers of lies.
So this will be the first of an ongoing series of posts in which I’ll highlight the brazen malevolence with which DHS has lied after these incidents. Most of these cases have been documented elsewhere. But too often the follow-up reporting that reveals the extent of the deceit has been buried by the latest horrifying news cycle. I also think it’s useful to put all of these stories in one place. If you know of a case that you think merits some public attention, please feel free to email me, or leave a link in the comments.
ChongLy Scott Thao
On January 18th of this year, at least 10 federal immigration agents gathered outside the St. Paul home of ChongLy Scott Thao, a 57-year-old Laotian immigrant and naturalized U.S. citizen. Neighbors saw the operation unfolding, and had come out to record and protest.
Within seconds, one agent took a battering ram to Thao’s front door, and the other heavily-armed officers filed into the house.
Thao was apprehended in front of his family, including his children and terrified five-year-old grandson. Thao’s daughter-in-law told the agents that he’s a U.S. citizen and pleaded with them for a moment to obtain his paperwork. They refused. Instead, they took Thao out of his home and into the frigid January air, in handcuffs, dressed only in his underwear, sandals, and a blanket draped over his shoulders. They put him in an unmarked SUV and drove off. They did not tell his family why or where they were taking him.
Here’s video of the raid shot by a neighbor:
According to Thao’s lawsuit, the agents then drove him around for more than an hour while interrogating him. At one point, they stopped and forced him back into the winter cold, still clad only in his underwear, so they could photograph and fingerprint him. They never read him his rights. They never told him why they had abducted him.
Once the officers were apparently satisfied that Thao was indeed a U.S. citizen, they returned to his home, dropped him off, and left. There was no apology to Thao or his family. Armed federal agents had just broken down the door of an American family, abducted the family patriarch in his underwear at gunpoint, then dropped him off with no explanation.
The agents who raided Thao’s home did not have a search warrant or arrest warrant. A few days after the raid, the AP reported that DHS had been operating on a secret memo from its Office of the General Counsel, which argued that immigration officers don’t need a judicial warrant to forcibly enter private homes in search of undocumented immigrants. The memo claimed that agents need only an administrative warrant, which can be signed by one of the immigration officers themselves.
Legally, the memo is garbage. The reason we have a Fourth Amendment is because the framers of the Constitution wanted to protect the Castle Doctrine, or the idea that the home should be a place of peace and sanctuary, and thus can’t be invaded by the government on a hunch or a whim. While the Fourth Amendment requires law enforcement to obtain a judge’s signature to storm private homes during criminal investigations of murder, burglary, or drug distribution, the DHS memo — and the MAGA hacks who have defended it — claims that if they’re merely investigating immigration violations, federal law enforcement can break down all the doors they please with no judicial oversight.
It’s an absurd argument, and it’s embarrassing for them and insulting to us that they think we’d buy it. In a sane country, the authors of the memo would face professional sanctions for such a transparently post hoc attempt to legitimize government violence against vulnerable people — and to immunize the policymakers who order it and the agents who carry it out.
When the horrific treatment of Thao made national news, DHS deflected with a series of slanderous claims aimed at making Thao a less sympathetic victim. The raid was not about immigration enforcement, the agency claimed. It was about apprehending sex offenders. Here’s former DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, maligning Thao after agents terrified and humiliated him:
When the X account of the House Democrats reprimanded DHS for raiding the home of a U.S. citizen without a warrant, McLaughlin shot back with this:
The “wanted” press release featuring the two Hmong men was clearly an attempt by DHS to deflect from what they’d just done. I looked through a couple months of DHS press releases from January and February. I found plenty of examples of them boasting about arresting sex offenders. This is the only example I could find of them asking the public’s help in identifying alleged fugitive sex offenders.
Note how easily McLaughlin moves between “he looked like one of our suspects” to “he lived with our suspects so he’s guilty by association,” to “he asserted his rights, so he must be guilty.”
None of these are adequate reasons to take a battering ram to the Fourth Amendment. But just as importantly, the first two aren’t true. (I don’t know if Thao refused to be photographed or fingerprinted, but if he did, he was entirely within his rights, given how it all went down.)
Let’s start with the most obvious: Thao does not “match the description” of either of these alleged sex offenders. He looks nothing like Lue Moua the man on the right. But as I’ll explain momentarily, there is at least an explanation for why they tried to link Thao to Moua. It’s an explanation that makes DHS look like amateurish storm troopers eager to trample the rights of nonwhite people on the flimsiest pretext, but it is at least an explanation.
The decision to release the photo of Vang, the man on the right is harder to explain. Not only is there no connection between Thao and Vang, I haven’t found any connection between Vang and Moua. As you can see, Thao also looks nothing like Vang, either. And there’s a 20-year age difference between them.
Thao also did not live with either of these men. He lived with his family. According to the state registry, the sex offender nearest to Thao’s home lived two blocks away. Thao and his family also made clear that they had never seen or spoken to either of these men. At the time, that claim was met with, “Well of course they’d say that” ridicule by MAGA influencers.
A couple days later, more reporting revealed how DHS could have made such a colossal mistake. Hours before the raid, federal agents had pulled over Thao’s son. The car he was driving belonged to his cousin’s boyfriend, who had lent it to him. It turns out that that the boyfriend has the same name as Lue Moua, one of the alleged sex offenders. We have to speculate here, since DHS refuses to even acknowledge its mistakes, much less investigate them. But the most probable explanation is that the agents who pulled over Thao’s son ran the name of the car’s owner through a database, got a hit on that name, and immediately went to raid the address of the person driving the car. It apparently didn’t matter that the driver of the car was not the owner who has the same name as one of the alleged sex offenders. They now had an address they could raid. Seems like precisely the sort of widely, sloppily cast net that that the Fourth Amendment is supposed to prevent.
But even this still doesn’t explain why the agents then arrested and abducted Thao.He was neither the person driving the car, nor the owner of the car who shared a name with one of their targets. Nor did he look like anything like either of their suspects. Perhaps these agents just think all Asian men look the same. Or maybe they thought they’d just arrest the owner of the home and threaten him until he gave them other names to arrest. (They’ve been caught doing that, too.)
McLaughlin’s post also hammers home the legal vacuity of the OLC memo. DHS claims they’re allowed to conduct violent forced entry raids on private homes without a judicial warrant because immigration enforcement isn’t criminal in nature, and because undocumented people with removal orders don’t have Fourth Amendment rights. I don’t agree with any of that. But DHS’s defense of the raid after the fact shows just how much power they believe they have to conduct warrantless raids extends.
Here they claimed to be targeting undocumented immigrants suspected of actual crimes. They didn’t bother to check to see if they’d also be raiding U.S. citizens who happened to live in the home. But when they learned that this was the case, McLaughlin still justified the raid by implying that DHS can also subject any U.S. citizens who happen to live with, look like, or associate with undocumented people to warrantless raids, too. And that’s before we get to the fact that there were no undocumented people in the home. Everyone these agents terrorized was a U.S. citizen.
From the moment they realized Thao was a U.S. citizen and not either of their alleged sex offenders, DHS knew that they had needlessly and illegally terrorized an innocent family. And yet they continued to propagate lies about what happened.
Here’s an article Fox News ran on the day of the raid:
A viral video circulating on social media Sunday appeared to show agitators interfering with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation targeting an alleged child sex offender in Minnesota.
The video, posted to X and viewed more than 750,000 times within hours, shows an ICE agent confronting people in St. Paul who he said were honking their car horns and disrupting federal officers as they attempted to take a suspect into custody.
“We’re here to arrest a child sex offender and you guys are out here honking,” the agent says in the video . . .
Responding to the video on X, Homeland Security (DHS) Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin on Sunday praised federal law enforcement officers for continuing their work amid increasing resistance.
“God bless the men & women of [ICE] and [Customs and Border Protection] who risk their lives to arrest these criminals,” McLaughlin wrote.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also weighed in, posting, “God Bless ICE” — a message that was later reposted by the official White House X account.
Elon Musk reacted to the video as well, writing simply, “Crazy.”
That article was posted at 10:36pm, several hours after Thao had been returned to his home.
Here’s McLaughlin’s post about the video in the Fox article:
I searched the Fox News site and Google for a follow-up article about how the protesters were right. Or clarifying that Thao isn’t a sex offender and doesn’t live with sex offenders. Or about how DHS raided the home of an innocent family of U.S. citizens without a judicial warrant. If such an article exists, I couldn’t find it.
Once word got out about Thao’s citizenship, DHS again tried to deflect. They stressed that the real issue was that two sex offenders were still on the loose. They blamed Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and other state officials for that — for refusing to turn over undocumented criminals to federal immigration officials when state and local police apprehend them. These two dangerous men, McLaughlin wrote, had been “taking sanctuary” in St. Paul.
That was also a lie. A few days after the raid, the Minnesota Department of Corrections revealed that Moua has been in a state prison since 2024. So the man who shared a name with Thao’s niece’s boyfriend — the only plausible justification for this raid . . . was already incarcerated, and had been the entire time.
DHS has never retracted their lies about Thao. Their guilt-by-association accusations are still posted on X, as is there press release claiming that Moua is a fugitive on the loose in St. Paul.
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I want to end by discussing why Thao came to the U.S., and why so many Hmong ended up in the Twin Cities area.
ChongLy Scott Thao came to the U.S. with his mother when he was a child. In the 1960s and 1970s Laos, like much of Southeast Asia, had become part of the proxy war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
The Hmong are a minority group who migrated from China into the mountains of Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, and Myanmar in the 1700s and 1800s. They were frequently the targets of discrimination and periodic purges. During the Vietnam War the CIA recruited dissident Hmong to help fight its “Secret War” against the communists who were both trying to take control and Laos and aiding the North Vietnamese. When the communists took over in 1975, they waged a campaign of persecution and genocide against the Hmong. Tens of thousands of Hmong fled to Thailand.
The U.S. at first refused to grant asylum to the Hmong who fought for the CIA, deeming them “too primitive” for resettlement. After a few years of shaming and lobbying, about 50,000 were given asylum in the U.S. in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Thao and his mother were among them. His mother had good reason to seek asylum: She had been nurse who treated the Hmong soldiers fighting the communists.
The Hmong refugees were spread around the country, but many migrated to population centers to be near family and other Hmong. Many ended up in cities in the upper Midwest, probably in large part due to the comparatively welcoming posture toward immigrants.
Many Hmong remained in hiding in Laos, or in neighboring countries. The U.S. has continued to grant asylum to them as they’ve sought refugee status in the years since. (Or at least we did until recently. Only white South Africans get asylum now.)
When the Clinton administration supported a plan to repatriate Hmong refugees in Thailand to Laos in 1995, it was conservatives who spoke out. This National Review article, for example, denounced the plan as a scheme to send the Hmong back to a government that would persecute them. “To a degree probably unmatched among other would-be immigrant groups today,” author Michael Johns wrote, “the Hmong have spilled their blood in defense of American geopolitical interests.” Ten years later, Laotian troops allegedly massacred a group of two dozen unarmed Hmong women and children.
Despite this history, Trump’s immigration officers have terrorized the Hmong community in Minnesota. White residents reported immigration officers coming to their homes and demanding to know “where the Asians are” or “where the Hmong are.”
Under Trump (and during the last Trump administration), Hmong people in the U.S. who are not citizens now face the threat of deportation to a country they’ve never known, and whose government continues to persecute them as collective punishment for other Hmong cooperating with the CIA decades ago. Many were born in Hmong refugee camps in Thailand because their parents were fleeing persecution.
Human rights groups warn that the Hmong in Laos remain at risk of genocide due to “dehumanization, polarization and persecution,” and face “systematic discrimination, forced displacement, and state-sponsored violence” — all solely because of their ethnicity.
Sounds horrific. It’s a good thing we don’t do that sort of thing here in America.
Keep up the important work addressing the rise of the “warrior cop” mentality. I witnessed this firsthand over my 25-year career as an FBI agent, and it’s becoming an increasingly concerning trend.
We aren't too far from a Kristallnacht