Federal immigration agents searched the home of a family in Oklahoma and seized their belongings when conducting a search warrant issued for someone else.
The U.S. citizen mother of three daughters said the family has been “traumatized” since they were wrongly subjected to a search and seizure warrant that had the names of the residents who previously lived in her Oklahoma City home.
“We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens,” the woman told KFOR, an NBC-affiliated local TV news station. “They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless.”
According to KFOR, which first reported the story, the immigration agents raided the home last week. They had a search warrant for the home, but the suspects listed on the warrant were not living in the house anymore.
About 20 armed agents busted through the door in the middle of the night, KFOR reported.
At first, the mother didn’t know who they were. “It was dark. All the lights were off,” she said. “My initial thought was we were being robbed — that my daughters, being females, were being kidnapped.”
The mother, whose identity was not revealed and who KFOR referred to by the pseudonym “Marisa” in its reporting, told the TV station the men who entered her home identified themselves as federal agents with the U.S. Marshals Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigations and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“The U.S. Marshal Service was not involved in the incident,” Brady McCarron, deputy chief of public affairs at the United States Marshals Service, told NBC News in an email Tuesday.
‘We didn’t do anything’
A spokesperson for the FBI referred NBC News’ request for comment to Homeland Security Investigations, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security that investigates criminal cases.
A senior DHS official confirmed to NBC News on Wednesday that ICE carried out “a court-authorized search warrant for a large-scale human smuggling investigation,” involving eight Guatemalan nationals indicted in a federal case in the Northern District of Oklahoma.
“The search warrants included the location of an address where U.S. citizens recently moved. The previous residents were the intended targets,” the official said.
The mother and her daughters wrongly targeted had recently moved from Maryland, settling in the rented home in Oklahoma City just a couple of weeks ago — hoping for a slower, more affordable lifestyle, KFOR reported. The father was set to join the family in their new home this weekend.
Though none of the family members were the subjects of the warrant, federal agents raided their home and confiscated their belongings. They took their phones, laptops and all their cash savings as “evidence,” KFOR reported.
“I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here,” the mother 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.”
“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,” the mother added.
She said the agents ordered her and her daughters to step outside, even though it was raining and they barely were given time to 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 woman told KFOR.
“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.”
Before the agents left, the mother asked when could the family get their belongings back and they said it could be days or even months, KFOR reported.
DHS did not comment on how the mother described and characterized the actions of the agents.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
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