ICE raids wrong Oklahoma home, seizes life savings and leaves family ‘traumatized for life’

An Oklahoma mother and her daughters, all U.S. citizens, were reportedly subject to a violent and humiliating raid by federal immigration agents last week, despite allegedly not being the intended targets of the operation.

“It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens,” the mother, using the pseudonym Marisa, told KFOR of the raid.

“You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life,” she added. “We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow.”

Early Thursday morning, a multi-agency team of agents burst into the Oklahoma City rental home where the family had just settled after moving from Maryland, according to Marisa.

The agents demanded the woman and her daughters go outside before they were able to fully change into day clothes, she said.

“They wanted me to change in front of all of them, in between all of them,” Marisa told KFOR. “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.”

Agents told the family they had a search warrant, though it named an individual who appeared to have been a previous tenant of the home, Marisa said.

Nonetheless, the officers tore through the home and seized phones and much of the woman’s life savings in cash as evidence, while declining to leave a business card or give any indication of when she’d get her property back, Marisa said.

“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here,” she added in her KFOR interview. “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.”

The mother said that the agents identified themselves as members of the FBI, the US Marshals, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Marshals denied participating in the raid, while the FBI told the outlet it had assisted on the case.

"ICE was carrying out a court authorized search warrant for a large-scale human smuggling investigation. The case has been accepted for federal prosecution in the Northern District of Oklahoma,” a senior DHS official told The Independent. "The search warrants included the location of an address where U.S. citizens recently moved. The previous residents were the intended targets. The investigation resulted in the indictment of eight Guatemalan nationals for their roles in smuggling illegal aliens into the United States. Two of the eight indicted aliens have criminal convictions for narcotics possession, identity fraud, money laundering, and re-entry after deportation."

In February, Oklahoma finalized multiple agreements with federal officials to increase cooperation on immigration operations as part of its “Operation Guardian.”

Multiple U.S. citizens have been mistakenly detained as part of a push from the Trump administration and its allies to increase immigration enforcement.

As part of the crackdown, the Trump administration has also resumed pursuing so-called “collateral arrests“ of individuals who weren’t the intended target of immigration raids but who were nonetheless encountered by officers.

Such arrests were the subject of a 2022 class action settlement, putting strict limitations on how officers use such arrests.