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.
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
You’re misunderstanding that you don’t need to declare an actual war to use wartime emergency powers. At any given time there are dozens of official federal emergencies, some of which have been in place for decades, allowing the White House to claim emergency powers.
Youre argument makes no sense, and is contradicted in each sentence.
The Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Iraq wars, none of those were declared as actual war by congress.
And yet, they were still wars, with lots of deaths of Americans. Clearly, those that are committed to fighting wars, don’t feel like they require the distinction of being legally declared wars by Congress.
The war on drugs is just political rhetoric and has no actual legal bearing.
And yet many people have died, been imprisoned, and died as a result. Just try to tell people who are serving years or decades in prison that their sentences were just “political rhetoric,” and had “no actual legal bearing.”
