An Oklahoma City woman says she and her three daughters are traumatized by a botched raid on their home by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
ICE took their phones, laptops and the mother’s life savings, per a report from News 4.
The report referred to the mother as “Marisa.” It described how “about 20 men, armed with guns, busted through the door” of the home she was renting in an apparent effort to locate former residents of the home.
From the report:
“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.”
Marisa said the names on the search warrant were not hers or anyone in her family.
She recognized them as names listed on mail still arriving at the house—likely former residents.
“We just moved here from Maryland,” she said. “We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens.”
It comes around the same time ICE deported a Cuban-born mother of a 1-year-old girl — separating them indefinitely — and three children ages 2, 4 and 7 who are U.S. citizens along with their Honduran-born mothers.
The three cases raise questions about who is being deported, and why, and come amid a battle in federal courts over whether Trump’s immigration crackdown has gone too far and too quickly at the expense of fundamental rights.
Lawyers in the cases described how the women 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 American Civil Liberties Union, National Immigration Project and several other allied groups said in a statement that the way ICE deported children who are U.S. citizens and their mothers is a “shocking — although increasingly common — abuse of power.”
The 4-year-old — who is suffering from a rare form of cancer — and the 7-year-old were deported to Honduras within a day of being arrested with their mother, Gracie Willis of the National Immigration Project to The Associated Press.
In the case involving the 2-year-old, a federal judge in Louisiana raised questions about the deportation of the girl, saying the government did not prove it had done so properly.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
