The woman who actually lives in the house had just moved to Oklahoma City from Maryland with her family about two weeks earlier.
“I keep asking them, ‘who are you? What are you doing here? What’s happening,’” she said. “And they said, ‘we have a warrant for the house, a search warrant.’”
She said they ordered her and her daughters outside into the rain before they could even 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.”
Marisa said the names on the search warrant were not hers or anyone in her family.
“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.”
Marisa said the agents tore apart every square inch of the house and what few belongings they had, seizing their phones, laptops and their life savings in cash as “evidence.”
“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.”
Now, Marisa said they have, quite literally, nothing.
“I said, ‘when are we going to get our stuff back?’ They said it could be days or it could be months,” she said.
Marisa said she is left with nothing but questions.
Why is ICE seizing anything outside of whoever they supposedly had a warrant for? Did the warrant say take all electronics and valuables as they are being used to hide/fund someone we don’t like, but the people that live their, yeah their fine let them be? Like what? How is this not just want to be terrorists fucking over people with impunity?
The cops have been the biggest thieves for a long time.
They have been doing shit like this for years anyway. The cops in some communities even outright stop countless vehicles coming out in order to 'seize drug money’and they end up taking any cash the person has without any evidence whatsoever. This is some Robin Hood villain shit.
Robin Hood was stealing from the rich to give to the poor, not robbing the poor for the rich.
It is so demoralizing to try and explain civil asset forfeiture. I’ve never had a single person believe that it’s real when I tell them about it - everybody insists that it can’t possibly be true since it’s so flagrantly unconstitutional.
“The court system in my country is so close-knit with the police that they have a policy of not charging cops with most of the crimes they might commit when on duty or requiring any proof of their statements in court.” Yeah it’s demoralizing but I don’t find it hard to explain because at a high level the issue isn’t complicated.
John Oliver had a segment on this that may help convince people that it is real: https://youtu.be/3kEpZWGgJks
It’s “constitutional” because they’re accusing the “money” of being used illegally. There’s no actual person being accused here, but if you want to get your money back you’ll need to prove it’s innocence in court.
It’s ridiculous. At least the Institute for Justice has been winning court cases against this, but there’s still a long way to go: https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil-forfeiture/
Edit: typo
Why does ICE have jurisdiction to seize civil assets anyway? Does my cash need a fucking passport now?
We decided we needed to be able to shut down drug dealers by seizing their money without need for any real proof. Since then the majority of seizures, 84%, are civil most incidental to purposeless searches that turn up no crime. Many seizures are in fact under $1000 and most are under $2000. In theory you can get your money back but it often would cost thousands so for most victims its impossible to actually get money back without spending more.
Basically for decades the authorities have been acting as robbers and have collectively stolen billions from the people directly often stopping minorities for driving while black and treating the $400 in random bob’s wallet as proceeds of an imaginary crime they don’t need to substantiate. Being black and having $400 is enough.
Who is “we”? Please leave me out of this cult.
We decided we needed to be able to shut down drug dealers by seizing their money without need for any real proof.
This is why it was so important to declare a “War on Drugs.” Most people thought it was just political rhetoric, but it was far more than that. By declaring a literal WAR on drugs, it offers the government an array of options that aren’t available in peacetime. One of those being the ability to alter the way suspects/combatants and their possessions/ weapons are treated. Money and valuables can be treated as a tool of drug dealing, and confiscated as spoils of war.
Youre really misunderstanding what declaring an actual war is or is not. Technically the US has not been in an actual declared war since WWII.
The Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Iraq wars, none of those were declared as actual war by congress. The war on drugs is just political rhetoric and has no actual legal bearing.
You cant declare formal war on drug use because drug use isnt a recognized sovereign country
How do you know they are even ICE. Not saying they aren’t agents, but there was an EO that basically repurposed a lot of other agencies to become ICE deputies. DEA, ATF, etc.
