A US citizen was dragged out of his Minnesota home in his underwear by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents during a search for two sex offenders who allegedly lived at the property.
ChongLy “Scott” Thao, who has no criminal record, was napping when his daughter-in-law woke him up to tell him that ICE agents were banging on the door of their home in St. Paul on Sunday, the Associated Press reported.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said the ICE raid was a “targeted operation” seeking “two convicted sex offenders” at the address.
“The individual refused to be fingerprinted or facially ID’d. He matched the description of the targets,” DHS said.
But Thao told the AP that only he, his son, his daughter-in-law and 4-year-old grandson live at the rental home and neither they nor the property’s owner are listed on Minnesota’s sex offender registry.
The confusion may have been related to Thao’s son, Chris, getting stopped earlier in the day by ICE while driving a car that he borrowed from his cousin’s boyfriend. The boyfriend shares the first name of a separate Asian man convicted of a sex offense, court records show.
Thao said the feds “broke down the door” without showing a warrant, and masked agents with guns forced their way into the house. He asked his daughter-in-law to find his ID while he was being detained, but agents said they didn’t want to see it.
Thao said he was handcuffed, then led outside in the freezing coldwearing just sandals, underwear and a blanket wrapped around his shoulders.
After being arrested, he was driven “to the middle of nowhere,” before being made to get out of the car in the freezing cold so agents could photograph him, Thao told AP.
When they realized Thao was a US citizen with no criminal record, he was brought back to his house two hours later and made to show his ID, he said.
Thao has been in the US since the 1970s, when his mother, Choua Thao, who worked as a nurse treating CIA-backed soldiers, was forced to flee Laos as the communists took over.
He now plans to file a civil rights lawsuit against DHS, and said he no longer feels able to sleep in his home.
“I don’t feel safe at all. What did I do wrong? I didn’t do anything,” Thao said.
His family also said it “categorically disputes” what it called the “false and misleading claims” from the DHS.
DHS did not respond immediately to requests for comment from The Post.
With Post wires
