It is utterly inevitable that when the U.S. government floods the streets with a new crop of hastily trained and prepared agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and give those people arbitrary quotas to achieve in meting out government brutality against illegal immigrants, that ordinary American citizens are going to get swept up into the net of pain. The killing of Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good, which the DOJ refuses to even do the sham courtesy of pretending to investigate, is of course the most high-profile example to date, but the litany of U.S. citizens arrested as they go about their daily business—even without any connection to protests or anti-government demonstrations—continues to climb as well. There was the pair of citizens, for instance, who spent eight hours in detainment for daring to record ICE agents, who were reportedly offered money or government favors in exchange for the names of undocumented immigrants or protest organizers. And as of this weekend, there was also the U.S. citizen who was marched out of his front door in handcuffs, in his underwear, into the 10-degree winter weather, because ICE agents couldn’t be bothered to confirm his identity or allow him to put some clothing on before abducting him from his family.
That man’s name is ChongLy or Chong Ly “Scott” Thao, a 56-year-old St. Paul resident who reportedly awakened from a nap to family members telling him that agents of ICE were in the process of breaking down the home’s front door. He was subsequently taken into immediate custody, handcuffed and loaded into an ICE vehicle, wearing only flip-flops and boxer shorts. The 60 seconds it would have taken to allow the naturalized U.S. citizen to put on a pair of clothes before heading to a presumed detainment facility was presumably too generous in the eyes of ICE—no time for trivialities when you have an arrest quota to meet, right? Thao’s family later said in a statement that the agents offered no explanation for why Thao was being taken, and that they had no interest in seeing the identification and proof of U.S. citizenship that family members attempted to show them. The agents would later demand Thao furnish these documents … after leaving the house where the documents were kept.
“I was shaking,” Thao said to the Associated Press. “They didn’t show any warrant; they just broke down the door.”
What, might you ask, was the DHS rationale for why agents had come to Thao’s house in the first place? The AP attributes this statement to DHS, likely from the mouth of professional liar and agency spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin: “The US citizen lives with these two convicted sex offenders at the site of the operation. The individual refused to be fingerprinted or facially ID’d. He matched the description of the targets.”
Thao’s family, on the other hand, explained in their own Monday statement that “the only individuals residing at the home are Mr. Thao, his adult son, his daughter-in-law, and his young grandson. The family does not know the individuals referenced in DHS’s statement.” The AP’s perusal of the state sex offender registry backs up this statement, with no listings connected to Thao’s home address. Which leaves the obvious question of “What the hell is DHS talking about?”
BREAKING — ChongLy Scott Thao’s family has released a statement disputing DHS’s outrageous justification for his arrest.
“He does not live with, nor has he ever lived with, the individuals DHS claims were targets of this operation…[the family] does not know the individuals DHS references.”
— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) Jan 19, 2026 at 5:01 PM
Seemingly in direct response to growing media attention on this particular case, and after initially refusing to detail to journalists who the “two convicted sex offenders” were that were being sought, the DHS abruptly reversed face on Tuesday and released two wanted posters specifically about the two men in question. Reuters rather oddly reported today that one of the two men from the posters “lived at the house but moved out” and was “the ex-husband of a member of the Thao family,” according to unnamed “relatives close to the situation,” but that account was immediately denied by ChongLy Thao’s sister-in-law, who refuted Reuters’ story and reiterated to local media that they have no idea who the two men in the posters are.
Thao’s family disputes @reuters.com reporting.
ChongLy’s sister-in-law told me: “The THAO clan has thousands of people, whoever they are talking about. We don’t know them. We don’t know the two men DHS is looking for.”
FWIW was told earlier there are 18 Hmong clans, creating many same last names.
— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) Jan 20, 2026 at 1:08 AM
None of this changes the fact that there wasn’t a single person at the actual residence that ICE or DHS was looking for, but that didn’t stop them from arresting a man in his underwear anyway. Does this all boil down to ICE simply getting an address wrong, and then refusing to acknowledge a mistake? An agent gets confused about last names? Or was there some other reason that Thao, a naturalized citizen for decades who was originally born in Laos, and whose mother was a U.S. asset as a nurse treating Hmong troops in the U.S. secret war in Laos (1961-1975) against communist guerillas, was specifically targeted?
Ultimately, Thao was only in the captivity of ICE for a couple of hours, but the psychological damage is well and truly done. Agents removed him from his home, fingerprinted and photographed him either outside of or in the ICE vehicle at some other location, and eventually dumped him back at his home, where he can now live in fear of the knowledge that masked agents of the federal government could return at literally any time to scoop him back up, offering no explanation for why he’s being targeted.
What I personally can’t get over, meanwhile, is how utterly pointless it all is. ChongLy Thao wasn’t being sought by ICE on suspicion of any kind of crime; nor was any other member of his family who lived in the home. Thao isn’t an illegal immigrant, as he’s been a naturalized citizen for literal decades. Verifying his citizenship would have been incredibly simple, only requiring agents of ICE at the house to check his identification against federal records, which is exactly what they eventually did, after abducting him. Why waste their own time taking him away, just to then bring him back? Moreover, what purpose does it serve to detain an innocent person while they’re in their underwear, in temperatures 20 degrees below freezing? Sheer sadism? What harm would have been caused by allowing the 56-year-old man to put on some pants, shoes and a shirt, even if you’re detaining him? Thao went with ICE agents willingly, out of fear, because he didn’t want to cause a scene or provoke violence in front of his family. At no point did they accuse him of resisting arrest. Did that not deserve the basic human dignity of letting the man put on some pants? Is it a REQUIREMENT that ICE agents need to be sociopaths, or is it just a happy coincidence that it dovetails so nicely with their duties? How long before Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and sends in the military as well?
Public sentiment on ICE is certainly not good, but at this point it’s a wonder that it’s not even worse. A mere 38% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration at this point, while only 26% believe that the shooting of Renee Nicole Good represented “an appropriate use of force.” Until those numbers are approaching zero, though, our misanthropic national state of mind endures.
