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Federal immigration agents forced open a door and detained a U.S. citizen in his Minnesota home at gunpoint without a warrant, then led him out onto the streets in his underwear in subfreezing conditions, according to his family and videos reviewed by The Associated Press. ChongLy “Scott” Thao told the AP that his daughter-in-law woke him up from a nap Sunday afternoon and said that 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 the 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.” Immigration Jan 16 You're asked to prove you're a U.S. citizen. Is that legal? Music & Musicians Jan 19 Bruce Springsteen dedicates song to Renee Good, decries crackdown on immigrants during New Jersey performance DHS Jan 17 Trump's DHS has shot 11 people during immigration enforcement operations since September Encounter caught on video 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. Videos captured the scene, which included people blowing whistles and horns and neighbors screaming at the more than a dozen gun-toting agents to leave Thao’s family alone. “It was so heartbreaking seeing him in that image,” Thao’s sister-in-law, said Louansee Moua in Facebook post. “You can’t get it out of your head. He has no clothes, and it’s, like, 12 degrees and it’s snowing.” Thao said agents drove him “to the middle of nowhere” and made him get out of the car in the frigid weather so they could photograph him. He said he feared they would beat him. He was asked for his ID, which agents earlier prevented him from retrieving. Agents eventually realized that he was a U.S. citizen with no criminal record, Thao said, and an hour or two later, they brought him back to his house. There they made him show his ID and then left without apologizing for detaining him or breaking his door, Thao said. DHS defends operation The U.S. Department of Homeland Security described the ICE operation at Thao’s home as a “targeted operation” seeking two convicted sex offenders. “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.” Thao’s family said in a statement that it “categorically disputes” the DHS account and “strongly objects to DHS’s attempt to publicly justify this conduct with false and misleading claims.” Thao told the AP that only he, his son and daughter-in-law and his grandson live at the rental home. Neither they nor the property’s owner are listed in the Minnesota sex offender registry. The nearest sex offender listed as living in the zip code is more than two blocks away. DHS did not respond to a request from The Associated Press seeking the identities of the “two convicted sex offenders” or why the agency believed they were present in Thao’s home. Thao’s son, Chris Thao, said ICE agents stopped him while…

Just one year into his second term, President Donald Trump has pardoned an unusually high number of wealthy people accused of financial crimes, according to an NBC News analysis of the last four administrations. Over half of Trump’s 88 individual pardons are for white-collar offenses, with money laundering, bank fraud and wire fraud among the most frequent crimes the president has wiped clean. Additionally, about half of the pardon recipients are either business executives or politicians. Included in the latest round of pardons, issued Thursday and Friday, were a former health care CEO, the former governor of Puerto Rico and a pair of siblings who were convicted on fraud charges — one of whom Trump previously freed for a different crime. A few pardon recipients are billionaires, including Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded guilty to enabling money laundering on his crypto platform; longtime English soccer club owner Joe Lewis, who pleaded guilty last year to insider trading charges; and Venezuelan-Italian banker Julio M. Herrera Velutini, whom Trump pardoned last week while he awaited sentencing on campaign finance violations. These are aside from the group of roughly 1,500 convicted Jan. 6 rioters he pardoned on his first day back in office and additional symbolic pardons for those involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. While net worth statistics for other pardon recipients aren’t easily available, the amount of fines and restitution that had been imposed on them is a rough signal of their wealth. The 87 people and one corporation pardoned by Trump in the last year had been ordered to pay more than $298 million in fines and restitution — $20 million more than the total owed by all of the pardon recipients in his entire first term, and vastly more than the totals previously owed by those who received pardons during recent Democratic administrations. “We have a very thorough review process here that moves with the Department of Justice and the White House counsel’s office,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a recent briefing, citing a team of attorneys who review every request that makes its way to Trump. She added: “And he was very clear when he came into office that he was most interested in looking at pardoning individuals who were abused and used by the Biden Department of Justice and were overprosecuted by a weaponized DOJ.” Fines, which are owed to the government, and restitution, which is owed to victims, are intended to make up for the harm caused by crime. While Trump in his second term has so far granted clemency to a broad range of people convicted of federal crimes, the pardons have often favored political allies or business interests. White House officials have consistently said the president is not focusing on fraud pardons but is focused, as Leavitt said, on cases where he thinks there was a political motivation for the case or an issue of overprosecution. Asked in an interview with CBS News last year about his pardoning of Zhao, Trump said, “I have no idea who he is. I was told that he was a victim, just like I was and just like many other people, of a vicious, horrible group of people in the Biden administration.” The president said in the interview he was “not concerned” about the appearance of corruption. “I’d rather not have you ask the question.” “I only care about one thing,” said the president. “Will we be No. 1 in crypto?” The wealth and status associated with many of those pardoned have raised concerns about potential financial and political influence on the clemency process. NBC News previously reported that the White House temporarily paused the pardon process in order to tighten its review following concerns from top officials that the process had become a lucrative business for lobbying and consulting firms during Trump’s second term. In the last year, 23 people pardoned by Trump owed more than $100,000 each in fines, restitution or both, with the total…

As the official celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence culminate on July 4, a well-financed, privately funded initiative will kick off to try to connect hundreds of millions of Americans with efforts to solve local problems. The “Be The People” campaign aspires to change the perception that the U.S. is hopelessly divided and that individuals have little power to overcome problems like poverty, addiction, violence and stalled economic mobility. It also wants to move people take action to solve those problems. Brian Hooks, chairman and CEO of the nonprofit network Stand Together, said the 250th anniversary is a unique moment “to show people that they matter, that they have a part to play, and that the future is unwritten, but it depends on each one of us stepping up to play our part.” Funded by a mix of 50 philanthropic foundations and individual donors, Be The People builds on research that indicates many people want to contribute to their communities but don’t know how. The initiative is targeting more than $200 million for its first year’s budget. Founding members range from nonprofits — including GivingTuesday, Goodwill Industries, Habitat for Humanity and More Perfect, businesses like Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment and the National Basketball Association, to funders like the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Hooks said this is a 10-year commitment toward trying to achieve what would be a profound shift in behavior and culture. He referenced a 2024 Pew Research Center survey that found most Americans in 2023 and 2024 did not believe that the U.S. could solve its most important problems, saying it was a “red alert” for the country. news May 10, 2024 Behind America's divided economy: Booming luxury travel and a jump in ‘relief' loans Donald Trump Apr 20, 2022 Poll Offers More Evidence that Partisanship is Dividing America Hooks said the initiative envisions actions far beyond volunteering or service that people could do in their free time. He pointed to a role for businesses and schools and said the initiative would launch a major data collection effort to track whether people are actually more engaged and whether problems are actually getting solved. Stand Together, which was founded by the billionaire Charles Koch, works across a broad range of issues and communities in the U.S. and has carved out a role for itself as a convener that can bring coalitions together across ideological lines. “Be The People,” will not incorporate as a new nonprofit, but act more like a banner for groups to organize under and use to connect to resources. As an example, at the Atlanta Hawks game on Monday, Martin Luther King III and his wife, Arndrea Waters King, linked a program they launched last year, Realize the Dream, which aims to increase acts of service, to the new campaign. “Our vision is that ‘Be The People’ helps lift up what is already happening in communities across the country and reminds people that service and shared responsibility are defining parts of the American story,” the Kings said in a written statement. Asha Curran, the CEO of the nonprofit GivingTuesday, said small actions can build on each other like exercising a muscle. “Our experience with GivingTuesday is that when people volunteer together, when people work together on something to do with positive social impact, they find it harder and harder to demonize each other,” said Asha Curran, its CEO. The initiative comes against a backdrop of deep polarization, economic inequality and the degradation of democratic norms and institutions in the U.S. Hahrie Han, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, has studied civic engagement and said people need more opportunities to authentically participate as problem solvers when connecting with local organizations. “They’re more likely to be invited into things where people are asked to let professional staff do most of the…

It’s been a year since a measles outbreak began in West Texas, and international health authorities say they will meet in April to determine if the U.S. has lost its measles-free designation. Experts fear the vaccine-preventable virus has regained a foothold and that the U.S. may soon follow Canada in losing the achievement of having eliminated it. The reevaluation is largely symbolic and hinges on whether a single measles chain has spread uninterrupted within the U.S. for at least 12 months. Public health scientists around the country are investigating whether the now-ended Texas outbreak is linked to active ones in Utah, Arizona and South Carolina. But doctors and scientists say the U.S. — and North America overall — has a measles problem, regardless of the decision. “It is really a question of semantics,” said Dr. Jonathan Temte, a Wisconsin family physician who helped certify the U.S. was measles-free in 2000. “The bottom line is the conditions are sufficient to allow this many cases to occur. And that gets back to de-emphasizing a safe and effective vaccine.” Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed 2,144 measles cases across 44 states — the most since 1991 — and nearly 50 separate outbreaks. The problem has been years in the making, as fewer kids get routine vaccines due to parental waivers, health care access issues and rampant disinformation. More recently, Trump administration health officials have questioned and sown doubt about the established safety of vaccines at an unprecedented level while also defunding local efforts to improve vaccination rates. “The most important thing that we can do is to make sure the people who aren’t vaccinated get vaccinated,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of Brown University’s Pandemic Center. “We have not issued a clear enough message about that.” A Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson said Thursday that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has consistently emphasized vaccines as the best way to prevent measles, adding that the CDC is responding to outbreaks and working to increase vaccination rates. As of Thursday, the department said it doesn’t have evidence that a single chain of measles has spread for a year. Measles finds the unvaccinated There is little room for error in trying to stop measles. The virus is one of the most contagious, infecting 9 out of every 10 unvaccinated people exposed. Community-level protection takes a 95% vaccination rate. The current rate nationally is 92.5%, according to CDC data, but many communities fall far below that. The patient in Texas’ first known case developed the telltale rash on Jan. 20, 2025, according to state health department data. From there, the outbreak exploded. Officially, 762 people fell ill, most of them in rural Gaines County, and two children died. Many more got sick and were never diagnosed: 182 potential measles cases among children in Gaines County went unconfirmed in March 2025 alone, state health officials said, a possible undercount of 44% in that county. Such data gaps are common, though, making it especially hard to track outbreaks. Many people living in communities where the virus is spreading face health care barriers and distrust the government. Contact tracing so many cases is also expensive, said behavioral scientist Noel Brewer, who chairs the U.S. committee that will finalize the data for international health officials. Research shows a single measles case can cost public health departments tens of thousands of dollars. CDC data on measles is still among the best worldwide, Brewer said, but “the U.S. has changed its investment in public health, so we’re less able to do the case tracking that we used to do.” Genetic sequencing can fill some gaps. But that’s not always enough to say the outbreaks are connected. Genetically, the measles virus doesn’t change as often as, say, flu. “Within an outbreak, everybody is going to look the same,” said Justin…