Last week, federal immigration agents executed a warrant on a home in Oklahoma City that authorities say is owned by a notorious human smuggling suspect. In the dark, about 20 men stormed into the house with guns drawn, according to a report from KFOR-TV. They swarmed the house, but what they found was not the owners, but new renting tenants, a mother and her three daughters, U.S. citizens freshly arrived from Maryland. The mother described details of the raid as horrifying: a woman and her children forced out into the night, their home ransacked, their property seized.
The Department of Homeland Security on Thursday posted about the raid on X: "The April 24 Oklahoma ICE operation was a lawful, court-authorized action explicitly targeting a property, that was a hub for human smuggling, not specific individuals, as falsely suggested by media reports...The warrant targeted the property itself, not specific individuals, and its execution was not contingent on the presence of any person. HSI, with Oklahoma state police support, executed the warrant with precision, seizing electronic devices as authorized."
What if they had been armed, indeed?
The mother, whom NBC affiliate KFOR in Oklahoma City gives the pseudonym Marisa, expressed her fear and outrage at the situation and noted that the outcome could have been much worse: “What if I would have been armed? ... You’re breaking in. What am I supposed to think? My initial thought was we were being robbed — that my daughters, being females, were being kidnapped. You have guns pointed in our faces.”
What if they had been armed, indeed? After all, many, many Americans are armed. According to the Pew Research Center, 4 in 10 U.S. adults live in households with guns. And we have been taught to regard those weapons as a right, particularly one that enables us to defend ourselves, our loved ones and our homes.
“Dynamic entry” raids — sometimes requiring police to knock before entering, sometimes not — were a source of serious controversy in the Obama years, resurrected more recently with the police shooting of Breonna Taylor during a March 2020 no-knock raid. But the fact that so many people are armed is a key reason dynamic entry raids are so dangerous.
As The New York Times reported in 2017, these raids “have also led time and again to avoidable deaths, gruesome injuries, demolished property, enduring trauma, blackened reputations and multimillion-dollar legal settlements at taxpayer expense.” That same report found that, from 2010 to 2016, there were 94 deaths resulting from such raids — including those of 13 law enforcement officers.
The evidence is already clear: Armed officers barreling into homes, weapons drawn, is a recipe for disaster. When a person is startled — particularly at night, perhaps even out of their sleep — by armed individuals rushing into their home and shouting commands, how unreasonable a response is it, really, to reach for a weapon and fire in what they assume is self-defense?
It’s the mixture of brutality and carelessness that really highlights the danger and should set our teeth on edge.
Isn’t it a question of when — and not if — we see shots fired inside someone’s home in the course of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown? And if so, what happens when one of these questionable raids results in lethal violence — presumably driven by the confusion and instinct for self-defense as “Marisa” describes?
The most immediate answer is that it will be an unspeakable tragedy for all the loved ones affected. But, more to the point, what do we expect this administration would do?
The potential for a dangerous, explosive situation is very real. Consider the fuel this could provide to an administration already taking a draconian line on policing dissent. President Donald Trump, Elon Musk and other administration officials could use the resulting tumult to further fan the flames of anti-immigrant fearmongering while also planting the seeds for a new “War on Cops” moral panic.
It’s the mixture of brutality and carelessness that really highlights the danger and should set our teeth on edge.
Republicans have threatened to go after nonprofits they deem to be supporting terrorists, a definition that seems to include organizations, as well as universities, that support broadly liberal ideas about immigration, diversity or the environment. Trump explicitly stated he wants to send “homegrowns” to the notorious Salvadoran prison CECOT. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has suggested that Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s call for mass protests could be “construed as inciting violence.”
This is what they are saying and doing now. It isn’t difficult to imagine how the president and his most powerful allies could exploit a genuine tragedy to use even more extreme actions in their crackdowns on immigration and, more broadly, dissent.
When I think of Marisa’s words — “What if I had been armed?” — I see the possibility for a truly terrifying cascade of events.