Wrong house raids are nothing new, though they remain as inexcusable now as ever, so when ICE, together with whatever spare letters the government cobbled together, obtained a warrant to raid a house in Oklahoma City, it never dawned on the agents that the people living in the house on the day of the raid were not the same people as the ones sought for deportation. And unlike those intended to be taken, these were citizens of the United States.
The agents had a search warrant for the home, but the suspects listed on the warrant do not live in the house.
The woman who actually lives in the house had just moved to Oklahoma City from Maryland with her family about two weeks earlier.
Why they had a search warrant for a house when their purpose was to arrest undocumented immigrants is a mystery. Why a judge granted the warrant, assuming there actually was a warrant which remains unproven, is a mystery. But even so, why the agents executing the warrant did not ascertain, immediately in advance of execution, that the facts upon which the warrant was sought and granted, that the people residing in the house were the people named in the warrant, is not merely a mystery, but inexcusable. Information that’s more than two weeks old is stale and should never be relied upon to engage in a no-knock raid.
But then things got worse.
“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.’”
She said they ordered her and her daughters outside into the rain before they could even put on clothes.
“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.”
The agents claimed to be from the United States Marshals Service, ICE and the FBI, although the Marshals Service denied any of their personnel were involved in the raid, although they were aware of the operation.
“We just moved here from Maryland,” she said. “We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens.”
She said the agents didn’t care.
“They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” she said. “I kept pleading. I kept telling them we weren’t criminals. They were treating us like criminals. We were here by ourselves. We didn’t do anything.”
Despite the failure of conducting a raid against the wrong people due to stale information, the first thing any modestly competent agents would do is ascertain that the people within the house were the people named in the warrant. They did not. Worse, when “Marisa” informed the agents they were citizens, checking their status could have easily determined that a mistake, stupid though it was, had been made and brought the operation to an end before more damage was done. But they did the damage anyway.
Marisa said the agents tore apart every square inch of the house and what few belongings they had, seizing 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.”
On the bright side, the agents didn’t rendition “Marisa” and her daughters to a foreign prison and manufacture a story about how she’s a gang member to justify their massive screw up, but after forcing them outside in their underwear, destroying their home and seizing their money, phones and laptops, they left wrongfully raided United States citizens to suffer the consequences.
“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.”
Now, Marisa said they have, quite literally, nothing.
“I said, ‘when are we going to get our stuff back?’ They said it could be days or it could be months,” she said.
Or they may never get their money, assuming it doesn’t somehow disappear, or possessions back if the government seeks to forfeit it and they can’t afford a lawyer to challenge the forfeiture. It’s hardly unusual in cases of governmental screw-ups that “evidence” is held until they can find some excuse to denigrate the wrongfully raided family and claim the agents were somehow not monumentally incompetent.
With the primary focus of federal agents now being directed toward rounding up immigrants, there is little reason for the government to concern itself with the niceties of making sure they’re raiding the right people at the right address. After all, make a mistake with aliens and they can just make their screw-ups disappear in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. No aliens? No error. That’s wrong enough, but when the targets turn out to be citizens, burying their errors takes on a very different taint.