A U.S. citizen says she and her three daughters were violently woken to federal immigration agents breaking into their Oklahoma City home and pointing guns in their faces in a case of mistaken identity that’s left them “traumatized.”
“My initial thought was we were being robbed. My daughters, being females, were being kidnapped,” the woman, who was only identified as Marissa, told Oklahoma City station KFOR while sobbing.
“I don’t know who they were. They had guns. It was dark. All the lights were off,” she said.
The woman said she had just moved with her family into the rental home from Maryland about two weeks prior, with her husband planning to join them in the coming days. The roughly 20 agents who forced their way into their home early Thursday said they had a search warrant for the property, but it was for someone who no longer lived there.
“We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens,” she said.
The woman said she and her daughters, who were all undressed, were ordered to go outside in the rain. If they wanted to get dressed, they were told to do it quickly and in front of the agents.
“They wanted me to change in front of all of them, in between all of them,” she said.
A Department of Homeland Security official confirmed to HuffPost Wednesday that ICE carried out “a court authorized search warrant for a large-scale human smuggling investigation” at the property and that “the previous residents were the intended targets.”
The warrant involved eight Guatemalan nationals who were indicted for allegedly smuggling illegal aliens into the United States, the official said. The official did not respond to questions about how the case of mistaken identity is currently being handled.
The mother, in her interview with KFOR, said her family was left traumatized by what happened and that none of their confiscated items have been returned. This includes their cellphones, computers and life savings in cash.
Before leaving, she said one of the men told her that he knew that the experience had been “a little rough.”
“You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life,” she reacted to that description.