ICE agents conduct a February raid in Colorado (Reuters)
Just when you think Donald Trump's deportation campaign can't get any more alarming, along comes a headline like this from the The journal Record in OKC: "Oklahoma family 'traumatized by apparent mistaken raid." The blame for this fiasco rests squarely at the feet of Trump himself. He is the one who launched extrajudicial detentions, often without a whiff of due process, essentially turning them into government-sanctioned kidnappings. Now we learn Trump can't even manage the ICE thugs he tends to sic on people who have engaged in no wrongdoing. It appears Trump's minions stooped to taking their victims' possessions this time, turning the "process" into state-sanctioned theft. More details on the Oklahoma incident come from The New Republic(TNR), under the headline "ICE Invades Wrong Home, Steals Their Life Savings, and Then Leaves; A woman says armed federal agents stole from her family and left their home trashed. “I know it was a little rough this morning,” one of them later told her."Hafiz Rashid writes:
In Oklahoma City Thursday, about 20 federal immigration agents raided the wrong home, forcing a woman out of the house with her three daughters, not even leaving them enough time to get dressed, and then seized their phones, laptops, and life savings.
The woman had only moved into the house two weeks earlier, after relocating to Oklahoma from Maryland. The armed agents told the woman, identified by local TV station KFOR as “Marisa,” that they had a search warrant, but the named suspects on the warrant didn’t live in the house and weren’t connected to anyone in the family.
“We just moved here from Maryland,” Marisa said. “We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens.”
The agents, who identified themselves as U.S. marshals, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and FBI agents, didn’t seem to care, waking the family up, forcing them outside in their underwear, ransacking the house, and taking the family’s belongings as “evidence.”
“They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” the woman added. “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.”
One agent told the family, “I know it was a little rough this morning.”
“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,” Marisa said. The agents told her that it could take days or months for the family’s stuff to be returned, and wouldn’t even give her a business card.
Perhaps Americans no longer should be shocked by this kind of behavior from our government. After all, Trump has made it clear he has no problem deporting residents without due process, a rock-solid right that is deeply embedded in our constitution -- and, until Trump came along, our social fabric. Trump has clearly stated that he intends to ship U.S. citizens -- "home-grown criminals" he calls them -- to places like the CECOT prison in El Salvador. Trump muses on the subject, seemingly with no concern that it is wildly illegal. Here is more from Hafiz Rashid:
It all fits a pattern of crueltyfrom the Trump administration in its efforts to deport as many people as it can. The White House doesn’t believe in due process or following the law, or even standards of basic decency. The violent raid in Oklahoma City would be wrong even against a family of undocumented immigrants, let alone U.S. citizens like Marisa and her daughters. Hopefully, she and other victims of the administration’s wanton behavior can get restitution.