CHEREE PEOPLES...KAMALA HARRIS ARRESTED ME BECAUSE MY CHILD HAD SICKLE CELL

Mother tells how she lost her house, job and nearly her kids when she was arrested in Kamala Harris' 'war on truancy' after disabled 11-year-old daughter missed school

When police pounded on Cheree Peoples's door and placed her in handcuffs she tried to explain that it was all a misunderstanding.

Her 11-year-old daughter was disabled and had only missed school because she was in severe pain and needed hospital treatment.

'Go talk to Kamala Harris,' an officer growled back at the woman in pajamas. 'Place your hands behind your back.'

But her 2013 arrest was all part of a splashy 'war on truancy' championed by Vice President Harris during her tenure as California's attorney general.

More than a decade later, the presidential candidate is pitching herself to the American electorate as a tough-on-crime former district attorney who took down predators, gangs, and fraudsters in the Golden State.

Cheree was none of those things and yet she was treated like a common criminal and put through 'two years of hell' before the case was finally dropped, she told DailyMail.com this week in an exclusive interview.

'My baby was sick, the school knew that – but Kamala Harris could not wait to throw a black woman with a disabled child into jail,' the mother-of-two fumed.

'She's a fake, she has no empathy and her policies are bad for parents. My message to black Americans: do not trust Kamala Harris.'

The troubling story of how a low income, minority parent found herself in the crosshairs of one of America's most powerful political figures is examined in the new documentary, Arrested by Kamala: A Black Mother's Story.

Harris considered the problem of persistent truancy in the California school system and concluded that chronic truants were statistically more likely to grow up to become gang members.

Filmmaker Joel Gilbert reveals that her solution was to go after parents, even if the majority of those affected would be from the same poor, black families she was promising to help.

As San Francisco district attorney and later state attorney general, Harris backed a statewide truancy bill threatening parents with a criminal misdemeanor punishable by a year in jail and a $2,500 fine if their kids skipped 10 percent of classes.

Cheree, one of the first to face arrest, was far from a deadbeat mom, as Gilbert's film reveals.

Her daughter was born with sickle cell anemia, a chronic blood disorder which left the little girl struggling to walk and prone to bouts of excruciating pain.

Shayla required powerful pain medication and blood transfusions every three weeks along with countless doctors' visits and trips to the hospital.

'She would say, mom, it feels like someone is stabbing me over and over with an ice pick,' Cheree, a nursing assistant and fulltime caregiver, said.

'I would have to give her bed baths instead of a shower because even the splashing of water was painful.

'The motion of driving could also be very painful. If you were going along a bumpy road it was almost like seeing a mom in labor pains on the way to the hospital, screaming at the top of her lungs.'

Inevitably, this meant Shayla missed significant stretches of school.

That year the little girl had over 60 absences from the Carl E. Gilbert Elementary School in Buena Park, Orange County.

Cheree had a formal 504 plan outlining the special accommodations her daughter required.

She felt she had supplied more than enough medical paperwork to account for all 60 days, but the school disagreed.

In all, 20 days were left unexplained and that was enough for Orange County's anti-gang task force to snap into action.

Cheree was three months postpartum following the birth of her son Rayden and was wearing just her pajamas when they came to arrest her on April 18, 2013.

'I said, are you really going to handcuff me, y'all got guns and stuff, I'm not about to run. They said yes Miss Peoples, it's the law,' she recalled.

'They placed a jacket around me and as I'm going out the door I can already hear the clicking of the news cameras.

'There were so many cars and trucks and people in suits, I thought, what is this? Did someone get murdered? This is what happens on Cops.

'I just couldn't believe that I was going to jail for truancy. I've got this sick daughter, I've got a 504 plan, I've got federal documents to protect my daughter and yet they are taking me in.

'Parents have a right to advocate for their child without being victimized or