On the morning of September 19th, a 40-year-old single mother was on her regular route, dropping off her four kids at school when she noticed an unmarked Nissan following her from the drop-off line.
The vehicle continued to follow her from a Tulsa elementary school, then a middle school, and even across town, as she headed to work cleaning houses. A second vehicle soon joined the first.
She made her way to a midtown Tulsa home for her first client of the day, but when she pulled into the driveway, she was blocked in by the same two vehicles that had been tailing her.
The mother knew her rights and remained in her car until the officers, whose vests read ICE and HSI, threatened to shatter her window. As soon as she got out of the vehicle, officers detained her and took her to the David L. Moss Criminal Justice Center, better known as the Tulsa County Jail.
When she was taken, sirens wailed and neighbors began to gather in commotion. Thirty-three-year-old Stewart Jones, the house cleaning client and a witness, estimated that the encounter lasted less than 10 minutes, and described one of the agents coming to the door after detaining the mother to give Jones her belongings.
“You’re safe now, we’ve detained this driver,” Jones recalled an agent saying to him after handing off her car keys. “But you’re not targeting a criminal. You’re targeting a mom of four,” he remembers responding.
ICE and DHS refused to comment for this story on their tracking and deportation of the single mother or their protocols for tracking and detaining people suspected of being in the United States without valid documentation.
The mother, whose name has been anonymized out of fear of retribution and harassment for herself and her family, cleaned houses in Tulsa for the past six years. She came to the United States from Mexico over 13 years ago, and close family friends—who have also asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution and harassment—described her as having no prior criminal convictions, not even a traffic ticket. All of her children were born in the United States, with the youngest being just three years old.