Found them
Like their boss in the Oval Office, none of the 20 gun-wielding agents who broke through “Marissa’s” door in Oklahoma City will take responsibility for terrorizing her and her daughters. Nor will their agencies. Right house. Wrong residents. Didn’t matter. They hustled the family outside into the rain in their underwear before tearing the house apart in their search:
“We just moved here from Maryland,” she said. “We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens.”
She said the agents didn’t care.
“They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” she said. “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.”
A little rough
“Marisa said the men identified themselves as federal agents with the U.S. Marshals, ICE, and the FBI,” reported local KFOR. Contacted by reporters, none of the agencies would acknowledge being there.
They tore the house apart and confiscated phones, laptops, and the family’s cash life savings as “evidence.”
“I said, ‘when are we going to get our stuff back?’ They said it could be days or it could be months,” Marisa said. She has no idea which agency took her belongings or how to get them back.
“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here,” she 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.”
Before they left, Marisa said one of the agents made a comment.
“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.”
I think we’ve found some of Donald Trump’s homegrown terrorists. They work for him.
Journalist Radley Balko commented on Bluesky:
I’ve watched too many of these raids to count. This one is one of the most infuriating in recent memory.
Appropriate that we learn about it on the same day SCOTUS hears oral arguments for a case that may remove the last remaining way to hold federal agents accountable for this kind of terror.
Balko refers to Martin v. U.S:
The Supreme Court on Tuesday morning was sympathetic to the victims of a “wrong house” raid in 2017, with several justices expressing surprise at the federal government’s efforts to contend that the actions of FBI agents were shielded from liability because their acts were discretionary. But it was not clear whether that their skepticism of the agents’ conduct would lead to the result that the victims were seeking.
Read the rest at SCOTUSblog. It will sound familiar. (For some reason the original page link isn’t working.)
Rachel Maddow Tuesday night, rather than run with the expected “Trump’s first 100 days” story, used this Oklahoma City raid as emblematic of “the shambolic mess” he’s made of the country in a mere 100 days. It is “all you need to know about this president, and his character, and the character of his leadership, and the government he runs, and what he is doing to this country.”
You feel it. In your guts. Maybe not like Marisa. Not yet.
“I just couldn’t understand how is this happening to us?” Marisa told KFOR.
We are all asking that question. As is the rest of the world. How are Americans allowing it to happen? How are their “leaders” in Congress allowing Trump to wipe his butt with the U.S. Constitution and our vaunted rights and liberties, yours and mine?
Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn recorded “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” in 1984 about Guatemala. It always seemed like a tragic story about a violent dictatorship far, far away. Not so much this morning.
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