Feds Execute Military-Style Raid on Texas Grandmother

This week Reason TV’s Tracy Oppenheimer documented
the story of Capt. Nicolás Aquino, who is currently attending
the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, California. In December
2013, Aquino was violently detained by the local sheriff’s
department after officers took him for a burglar. 

According to Aquino, after officers verified the Air Force
captain’s identity they told him, “that he [the officer] had wanted
to tase me if he had a Taser, and he would have shot and killed me
if he had drawn his weapon, and he would have been fully justified
in killing me.” 

Incidents like Aquino’s are no longer isolated
occurrences. 

Over at PJ Media, Bryan Preston has
the exclusive on the story of Gracie Escamilla, a 51-year-old
grandmother from Mission, Texas. 

In the early morning of October 18, 2013, men dressed in black
scaled the wall in Escamilla’s front yard and began pounding on the
front door. Escamillia thought she was going to be the victim of a
home invasion robbery, a crime that is common in her small town on
the Texas-Mexico border.

But the men swarming the Escamilla household that morning were
not criminals. They were federal agents.

As Preston writes: 

One officer flashed a piece of paper and said that they were
arresting Gracie on suspicion of Medicare/Medicaid fraud. Gracie
says that the officers, who she and Joel [her husband] say were
from the Federal Bureau of Investigations, never read Gracie her
rights.

“They did not read my rights. They just said, ‘You cannot get
anything. You can’t get your purse. Your phone. Nothing at all.'”
Gracie says she was never told to find an attorney.

Even worse, Gracie was still in her underwear when the mostly
male squad of officers entered her home. They quickly separated
Joel and Gracie from each other.

Soon after the raid, Escamilla—who operated a small company
called RioPlex medical billing out of her own home—appeared in the
local press as a suspect of Medicare/Medicaid fraud conspiracy. But
it appears that her only crime was guilt by association. A client
of Escamilla’s was arrested the same day for billing the government
for ambulance services that were not provided. Though Escamilla had
no part in the scheme, she was held at the federal Bentsen Tower in
McAllen, Texas, for days and was not allowed to make a single phone
call. And though agents arraigned her for Medicaid fraud, the
arresting officers took no files, no computers, and no evidence
from her home. 

Escamilla awaits trial and is fighting to clear her name. Her
case is another example of the troubling trend in police
militarization. 

Recently, Zach Weissmueller documented a similar case in Little
Rock, California, where Los Angeles County sheriffs deputies
swarmed the home of 80-year-old retiree Eugene Mallory.
Unfortunately for Mallory, the raid proved deadly. Watch his
heartbreaking story below: