The First Bumbling Raid

Investigative journalist Radley Balko launched an ongoing series cataloguing the false official statements that the Department of Homeland Security has issued after specific acts of abuse or violence by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officers in the field. The first installment examines the illegal raid on ChongLy Scott Thao and his family — a raid the agency described publicly in terms that contradicted its own paperwork.

The series itself is the substance: any single instance of an agency lying about a botched operation can be dismissed as anomaly; a methodical accumulation of cases, each documented from the public record, is a different kind of evidence. The cataloguing converts what looks like noise into pattern.