ST. PAUL, Minn.—A Minnesota county is investigating the arrest of a Hmong American man by federal officers, a moment captured on video as officials weigh whether the incident amounted to kidnapping, burglary and false imprisonment.
Ramsey County Attorney John Choi and Sheriff Bob Fletcher announced Monday they will pursue information from the Department of Homeland Security that they say they need to investigate the January arrest of ChongLy “Scott” Thao. Ramsey County includes St. Paul, the state capital, and the case has already roiled local lawmakers and neighbors.
According to Fletcher, immigration enforcement officers bashed open the front door of Thao’s St. Paul home at gunpoint without a warrant. Thao was then led outside “in just his underwear and a blanket in freezing conditions,” Fletcher said at a news conference. For people nearby, it wasn’t abstract or distant—there were horns and whistles, and the noise carried over the street as neighbors shouted at agents.
“There are many facts we don’t know yet, but there’s one that we do know. And that is that Mr. Thao is and has been an American citizen. There’s not a dispute over that,” Fletcher said. He also challenged the officers’ conduct in strongly personal terms, saying Thao was “forcibly taken out of his home and driven around.” Then, almost immediately, Fletcher asked the question that seems to be at the heart of the investigation: “Is that good law enforcement, to take an American citizen out of their home and drive them around aimlessly, trying to determine what they can tell them?’”
Choi said the county’s work is aimed at understanding what happened, not at pursuing a pre-decided conclusion. “This is not about, any type of predetermined agenda other than to seek the truth and to investigate the facts,” he said. Prosecutors, he added, want to determine whether crimes were committed that could be handled under state or federal law.
The timeline gets murkier as different explanations have been offered. In Thao’s own account, he is described as a longtime U.S. citizen with no criminal record, and he said in an interview in January that agents eventually realized who he was. He said they returned him to his home after a couple of hours.
Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has refused so far to cooperate with other state and local investigations involving the killings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Earlier, DHS said ICE officers were seeking two convicted sex offenders. But Thao said he had never seen the two men before and that they did not live with him.
The county investigation is unfolding alongside broader state efforts tied to Minneapolis shootings. The state and the chief prosecutor in Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, sued the Trump administration last month to gain access to evidence they say they need to independently investigate three shootings by federal officers in Minneapolis, including the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. That lawsuit accuses the federal government of reneging on its promise to cooperate with state investigations after an influx of around 3,000 federal law enforcement officers into Minnesota. Minnesota and Hennepin County have also urged the public to share information about federal officers’ potentially illegal activities, pointing to refusals by federal authorities to provide evidence.
The Trump administration has argued Minnesota officials don’t have jurisdiction to investigate those cases. State and county prosecutors say they still need their own inquiries because they do not trust the federal government. Meanwhile, the Justice Department said in January it opened a federal civil rights investigation into Pretti’s killing, and two officers have been placed on leave—though it said a similar federal probe wasn’t warranted in Good’s death.
For Thao’s family and neighbors, the most immediate question is simpler, and more pointed: what happened that night, and why. Investigators won’t have all the answers yet, Fletcher said—there are many facts they still don’t know—yet he also framed Thao’s citizenship as non-negotiable. Whether that leads to criminal charges, and under what laws, could take time, especially as officials press for cooperation from federal agencies—while the video evidence already sits there, loud and hard to ignore.
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