Heavily armed federal agents blew the door off a suspect’s home in Huntington Park, south of Los Angeles, when he wasn’t there. But his girlfriend and kids were.
The incident took place early on Friday morning as the authorities used a drone to search room by room for a man officials say rammed a federal vehicle during immigration raids last week.
“They were right here with their rifles, and we heard some screaming up in the front, but we couldn’t see because everything was blocked, but it was pretty shocking,” neighbor Lourdes Salazar told KABC.
The suspect, Jorge Sierra-Hernandez, wasn’t present when agents arrived, but his girlfriend, Jenny Ramirez, and two children were. Sierra-Ramirez turned himself in on Friday and was released on bail and is now back with his family.
“If they would’ve knocked on my door, I would have opened the door, but they blew up the window and door first,” said Ramirez. “There didn’t have to be that violence to enter my house.”
The front door was blown off, and a window was shattered as a drone was sent in.
Inside, Ramirez tried to protect her children. She told the local TV station that she was sleeping alongside her baby when her neighbor called to say that dozens of agents were outside her home.
“Where they broke the window, my baby was there, and before I got him out of there was when it exploded,” Ramirez told KABC. “My ears went blank, I imagine how they felt. They were shaking.”
After the explosion, she dropped to the floor with her children. A drone entered and searched for Sierra-Ramirez.
“They didn’t knock on the door, they didn’t let me know they were them, they just blew up my window and my door, and a drone came in,” she told KABC.
After the drone left, as many as nine agents entered the home with guns drawn, escorting Ramirez and the children outside.
“They didn’t identify themselves until I came out, they told me they were from Homeland Security” and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, she said.
She added that when she asked for an explanation, they told her, “When we find him, he’s going to know why.”
“What happened here this morning is hard to put into words,” said Huntington Park Mayor Arturo Flores.
“This family did nothing wrong,” he said. “They were involved in a minor traffic accident, and this is the level of violence and the response that we get.”
The federal response came after a government spokesperson claimed that Sierra-Ramirez rammed his car into a border patrol vehicle and obstructed federal agents during a protest against ICE raids last week in the area of Bell and Maywood.
“Set aside the monetary damage. You cannot put physical damage, you cannot put a dollar amount on the emotional damage and the trauma, also for the children,” said Flores.
Community demonstrations against ICE raids that have ruptured neighborhoods have continued in the wake of large-scale protests against President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement in downtown Los Angles and neighboring communities.
A record number of immigrants are in detention centers across the country as the Trump administration ramps up arrests and deploys federal officers from across law enforcement agencies to focus on immigration enforcement.
