In footage shared widely on social media last week, federal immigration agents were seen breaking into Gloria Magaña’s home Portland, Oregon, even though the person they were looking for does not live there.
The agents forced their way into the home without showing a warrant, Magaña told CBS News.
The raid occurred on Oct. 15. Magaña, a native of Mexico, said she got a call from her children, who told her the agents were shouting for someone named Israel, but nobody in their home goes by that name. She said she told her children to lock themselves inside a room.
With guns drawn, agents broke open the room’s door. Magaña’s daughter took a video of the heavily-armed agents telling them to put their hands up as her daughter, a three-month-old baby, cried. One of the agents asked if any of the men inside the room were named Israel.
Outside of the home, witnesses asked the federal officers for information.
“Stop watching TikTok. We don’t have to identify ourselves to you,” one agent was heard saying on video recorded by a witness.
While federal officials have since admitted they were looking for someone else, agents still detained Magaña’s 20-year-old son and her partner, saying they were in the U.S. illegally. Magaña said neither has a criminal record. Federal records reviewed by CBS News also indicate the men do not have any criminal charges or convictions.
ICE’s online detainee system indicated on Monday that Magaña’s son, Napoleon Magaña, was being held at the agency’s detention facility in Tacoma, Washington. Her partner, Arturo Garcia Cabrera, was transferred to the Adams County Correctional Center in Mississippi, the system showed.
A senior Homeland Security official told CBS News the federal agents who entered Magaña’s home on Oct. 15 were looking for an individual with a criminal history who they say had evaded arrest and fled into the apartment complex. The target of the operation remains at large, the official said.
“Two other aliens from Mexico were found inside the apartment and taken into ICE custody at the scene,” the official said, adding that no federal agents were hurt during the incident.
As millions took to the streets over the weekend for “No Kings” protests, federal agents in Portland deployed tear gas to disperse a crowd that had gathered outside and ICE facility, where for months there have been demonstrations denouncing the agency’s tactics as heavy-handed and indiscriminate.
In an interview with CBS News in Portland, Marcos Charles, the head of ICE’s deportation branch, Enforcement and Removal Operations, denied those charges.
“They’re not indiscriminate,” he told CBS News. “We do our surveillance. If you’re in the country illegally, we’re gonna arrest you.”
Charles also downplayed concerns that ICE’s tactics have become too aggressive.
“We use the force necessary to affect an arrest,” he said. “If people interpret that as being aggressive, so be it.”
Since President Trump took office again and launched a sweeping crackdown on illegal immigration, ICE agents have been given a broad mandate to detain and deport those in the U.S. illegally, with Biden-era limits on arrests of non-criminals reversed.
Charles said ICE is still primarily targeting immigrants in the U.S. illegally who also have committed crimes. But he said anyone in the U.S. illegally who is found by his agents will be arrested, even if they lack a criminal record and have been in the country for 40 years.
On Monday, an appeals court said the Trump administration could deploy National Guard troops to Portland to protect the ICE facility there while the legal battle over their deployment plays out.
Some in the local community are seeking to help those who could be targeted by immigration agents, including Pastor Mark Knutson, who has put up signs saying ICE agents need permission to enter his church.
“We’re not gonna hide people. What we’re gonna create is a space to be safe,” explained Knutson, who is a reverend doctor at the Augustana Lutheran Church. “And then we work the systems to help them get their amnesty or get the documents.”
“ICE cannot come in here … This could be a standoff if that happens,” he added.
Knutson said he prays he never has to face that reality.
