Washington — Marie Justeen Mancha was home alone in Southeast Georgia when four federal agents stormed into her house, shouting "police! Illegals!"

"My heart just dropped," she said. "When the tall man reached for his gun, I just stood there feeling so scared."

Mancha, a Mexican-American U.S. citizen from Reidsville, told her story Wednesday to members of a House subcomittee as it looked into reports that U.S. citizens had been questioned, detained and in one case even deported in federal Immigrations and Custom Enforcement raids.

Mancha was a 15 -year-old high school honors student at the time of the September 2006 raid on her home, which occurred in conjunction with an ICE raid at a poultry plant in nearby Stillmore. She and her mother, also a U.S citizen, are among plaintiffs in a lawsuit alleging that ICE targeted people based on their appearance.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who chairs the committee, said she feared that "an overzealous government is interrogating, detaining and deporting its own citizens while treating non-citizens even worse."

Gary Mead, assistant director for detention and removal at ICE, told the panel that his agency has "never knowingly or intentionally detained or removed a U.S. citizen," and if it did accidentally deport someone, it would take appropriate action to locate him or her and ensure immediate repatriation to the United State.

In the past four years, ICE has detained more than 1 million people and deported only one U.S. citizen, he said.

That person —Peter Guzman— told ICE agents that he was a Mexican citizen, Mead said.

Guzman's attorney, James Brosnahan, who also testified before the committee, described his client as "a person of limited mental capacity."

"They put him on a bus with $3," Brosnahan said.

Rep. Steven King (R-Iowa), ranking member of the committee, objected to the hearing topic, saying that a few isolated instances have been exaggerated.