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On a frigid day in late January, more than a dozen masked federal agents surrounded a white ranch house in St. Paul, Minnesota. They entered the home with guns drawn after one busted open the front door with a battering ram; when they re-emerged, they led a man wearing nothing but sandals, blue underwear, and a red plaid blanket thrown over his shoulders, head bowed, into the street. ChongLy “Scott” Thao, a U.S. citizen, told the Associated Press that the agents handcuffed him in front of his 4-year-old grandson and refused to let him retrieve his ID. In Thao’s telling, the agents drove him to the “middle of nowhere,” photographed him outside in the subfreezing temperatures, and asked to see the ID they had not let him collect before they returned him to his rental home a few hours later.
The Department of Homeland Security said its agents detained Thao because they believed he was living with two convicted sex offenders they were seeking to arrest, which he has denied. The AP reported that the nearest sex offender listed as living in Thao’s zip code is more than two blocks away, raising the question of why the department thought its targets were living at his address. And under what authority, exactly, did these immigration enforcement officers break into Thao’s rental? According to the Washington Post, ICE agents now have been empowered to enter homes in order to arrest immigrants, a directive that advocates say flagrantly violates the Constitution. “The highest levels of ICE are, in effect, saying agents should break down your door, ransack your home, terrify your children, arrest or detain you without a judicial warrant,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) told MSNOW. “It simply means the law means nothing to these agents.”
A flex of power like this should confirm the deeply-held suspicions of many on the right that federal agents are, as former National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre infamously worded it 30 years ago, “jack-booted thugs armed to the teeth who break down doors, open fire with automatic weapons and kill law-abiding citizens.” From Waco and Ruby Ridge in the ‘90s to armed standoffs at the Bundy ranch and the Malheur National Wildlife refuge in the mid-2010s, conservatives have long viewed use of force by federal agents as tyrannical — even when that threat of force was entirely made up, like when conservative officials and commentators stoked conspiracy theories that former President Obama would use military training exercises as cover to implement martial law and seize law-abiding citizens’ guns.
