Michele Devoe of Fitchburg rushed out of her home on Kimball Street on Thursday morning to see ICE agents detaining Juliana Milena Ojeda-Montoya in front of her family.

A Fitchburg teenager was among several people who watched in horror as a man appeared to suffer a seizure while being forcibly removed from his car by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents during a chaotic arrest outside her home Thursday.

“Witnessing what happened made me feel gross. I feel unsafe knowing ICE is around,” said Michele Devoe, 18. She’d been asleep in her bedroom on Thursday morning when her mother, Crystal Devoe, 46, woke her with a startling revelation.

ICE agents were outside on Kimball Street, her mother said — six or seven of them, confronting a man, a woman and their small child.

The Devoe women went to their front window and peered out to see a car stopped with half a dozen ICE agents “surrounding both the passenger and driver door, trying to get the adults out,” Michele Devoe recalled.

Michele Devoe rushed downstairs to join the growing crowd outside at around 8:20 a.m., she said. Neighbors had gathered and some were filming, while others shouted at the ICE agents. Cars began to line up and block traffic.

By the time the Devoes joined the scene, officers from the Fitchburg Police Department had already been called twice to “keep the peace” — first at 7:10 a.m. and again at 8:03 a.m., reporting that a crowd was gathering at the scene and the agents were in danger.

One person was speaking Spanish to the woman in the car, and one officer said, “Do you want to repeat that in English now?” according to Crystal Devoe.

The woman in the car, Juliana Milena Ojeda-Montoya, would later be identified as the intended target of the arrest by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

She has been accused of attacking her coworker with a pair of scissors and a trash bin in August, according to DHS. The exact location and timing of the reported incident in August are unclear.

MassLive and the Worcester County District Attorney’s Office were not able to find a record of that arrest in Fitchburg District Court records. The Fitchburg Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the arrest.

Crystal and Michele Devoe said that the local police officers and ICE agents at the scene did not appear to know the names of the people who were in the car, nor did they give a reason for her arrest.

“The guy kept saying there was a warrant out for [her], but he wouldn’t say what kind of warrant,” Crystal Devoe said.

After Michele Devoe had been outside for about half an hour, she said she witnessed the man who was in the car have a seizure. An ICE agent grabbed his neck in an attempt to pull him from the driver’s seat of the car as he held the baby, and his body began to shake; his eyes rolled back into his head.

“After he seized, they brought him out of the car in handcuffs and brought him to the ambulance,” Michele Devoe recalled. “A little later they returned him to [his own] car.”

The ICE agents “completed their apprehension” at 8:57 a.m., taking one woman — Ojeda-Montoya — into custody, according to Fitchburg police. The small child and man were both allowed to leave the scene.

“I feel as a white person that I’m sorry I cannot help enough,” said Michele Devoe. She added she’d only recently celebrated her 18th birthday and is eager to use her position as an adult “to speak up for what I believe in.”

“I will do anything I can to boost how I felt about what happened today, and how it keeps happening. I hope it wakes people up and realizes that this is what they voted for,” Michele Devoe said.

“I understand that if you come into this country illegally that you will get deported. What I don’t understand is why. America is stolen land. No one is illegal. We all are born in this world and we all pay to live here. Unfortunately. like everything else in this world, we are divided.”

Her mother, Crystal Devoe, said the entire situation is “sad.”

“This isn’t a bad neighborhood. It’s not the greatest, I’ve only lived here a couple of months, but it’s scary knowing that if you’re not a citizen at any time, you can be pulled out of a car and arrested in front of your child,” Crystal Devoe said.

“It was so sad. I had my daughter crying.”