An Oklahoma mother of three children is traumatized after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided their home last Thursday.
Agents confiscated phones, laptops and the mother’s life savings, according to KFOR, an Oklahoma City news outlet.
The family of four, however, weren’t the people sought by ICE. In fact, the suspects listed on the search warrant weren’t living at the family’s address, the news agency reported.
A senior Department of Homeland Security official told Newsweek that the intended targets of the raid were the previous residents of the home.
The mother, who KFOR refers to as “Marisa,” moved from Maryland to Oklahoma City with her three children two weeks ago.
Marisa’s husband stayed in Maryland, planning to join his family over the weekend, KFOR reported.
Then, on Thursday morning, 20 men armed with guns busted through the door of the family’s new home, according to Marisa.
She told KFOR that men identified themselves as federal agents with the U.S. Marshals, ICE, and the FBI.
“I keep asking them, ‘who are you? What are you doing here? What’s happening,’” she said. “And they said, ‘we have a warrant for the house, a search warrant.’”
Before Marisa and her daughters could even put on any clothes, the family were ordered by the agents to go outside in the rain, Marisa told KFOR.
“They wanted me to change in front of all of them, in between all of them,” she said. “My husband has not even seen my daughter in her undergarments — her own dad, because it’s respectful. You have her out there, a minor, in her underwear.”
Despite her repeatedly telling the agents that she and her children were citizens, Marisa said they were “they were very dismissive, very rough, very careless.”
She told KFOR that the agents tore apart her house and seized their phones, laptops and their life savings in cash as “evidence.”
“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here,” she said. “I have to feed my children. I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”
Before the agents left, Marisa told KFOR that one of them made a comment to her.
“One of them said, ‘I know it was a little rough this morning,’” she said. “It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens. And it was a little rough? You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life. We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow.”
A senior DHS official told Newsweek: “ICE was carrying out a court authorized search warrant for a large-scale human smuggling investigation.”
The Oklahoma City raid comes at a time where ICE deported a Cuban-born mother of a 1-year-old girl — separating them indefinitely — as well as three children ages 2, 4 and 7 who are citizens of the United States along with their Honduran-born mothers, according to the Associated Press.
Lawyers in cases involving the women described how they were arrested at routine check-ins at ICE offices, given virtually no opportunity to speak with lawyers or their family members and then deported within three days or less, the Associated Press reported.
The 4-year-old and the 7-year-old were deported to Honduras within a day of being arrested with their mother, according to Gracie Willis of the National Immigration Project. The 4-year-old child is suffering from a rare form of cancer, Willis said to the Associated Press.
“We have no idea what ICE was telling them, and in this case what has come to light is that ICE didn’t give them another alternative,” Willis said in an interview. “They didn’t gave them a choice, that these mothers only had the option to take their children with them despite loving caregivers being available in the United States to keep them here.”
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