No One Is Illegal On Stolen Land—ICE Versus the Indigenous in MAGA's America
Where would they send us?
Stories have been coming out daily of immigrants being abducted by Kristi Noem's Department of Homeland Security's (DHS's) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
Venezuelan migrants are being sent to a prison in El Salvador—not deported to their home country—without standing trial or being convicted of any crimes. A prison run by a self-professed dictator.
Elected officials and American citizens have been assaulted and arrested for “interfering” with ICE activities.
Many Americans worry no one is safe as the Trump administration works to eliminate the 14th Amendment’s provision of birthright citizenship.
Except for Indigenous Americans, of course. They're safe, right?
I mean, where would they send us?
El Salvador, apparently.
The truth is, Indigenous peoples are being targeted by ICE across the United States. Eliminating Black and brown immigrants is their primary goal, after all. And most of the immigrants coming from points south of the United States’ border are Indigenous peoples.
The North, Central and South Americans whom White nationalist politicians and political appointees vilify as the face of “illegal aliens” and the targets of the Trump administration, are the descendants of Indigenous and mixed-race people who once freely roamed the modern-day southern United States.
Their ancestors lived in the Americas for millennia. They routinely traveled throughout the region. Mass migrations also occurred due to drought or natural disasters.
Tribes, clans, and bands also found themselves on the wrong side of a line when borders were established by colonizers.
Ironically, the people targeting these Natives of the Americas—labeling them immigrants—can claim only a few hundred years or less on the land they now say is solely their own, having crossed an open border from the 17th to early 20th century.
It wasn't until 1917 that Congress enacted the first widely restrictive immigration law.
It wasn't until 1924 that Indigenous Americans with millennia of history in the United States were allowed to be United States citizens.
The Indigenous peoples of the United States look just like the immigrants the Trump administration and Project 2025 need gone to combat their Great Replacement conspiracy theory fears.
As a result, they're being harassed and detained.
It's only a matter of time before a member of a sovereign tribal nation inside the U.S. border is abducted and sent to El Salvador or one of several ICE detention camps.
In the southwest, the harassment has been so pervasive that the Navajo Nation was forced to create online resources for their citizens as part of their Immigration Crisis Initiative.
Mistaken Identity Or a Pattern of Abuse?
A Tohono O’odham woman's video posted June 14 recently went viral. In it, she captures three Border Patrol—another Homeland Security law enforcement agency that predates DHS and ICE—SUVs following the vehicle she's a passenger in.
Lisa Manuel shared on her original post:
“This is what we as Tohono O’odham experience on the daily from Border Patrol. They’ve killed our O’odham with no justice served. They’ve terrorized us on the highways ever since I was little. This is the norm and SHOULD NOT BE. I started filming once they got behind us. Mind you I just lost my only Son and I was ready to stand up and fight!”
Her video quickly went viral.
One hashtag on her post read:
“We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us.”
The United States did cross the Tohono O’odham Nation in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that was signed between the governments of the United States and Mexico to end the Mexican-American War.
Mexico ceded ~525,000 square miles to the United States—in what is now all of California, Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico; most of Arizona and Colorado; and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming—in exchange for $15 million and the USA assuming responsibility for all Mexican debts to U.S. citizens.
The Treaty also established the Rio Grande River as the border between Texas and Mexico. White Mexicans living in ceded territories were given the option to retain their Mexican citizenship or acquire U.S. citizenship.
But such options were not afforded to anyone deemed too brown to be White—Indigenous tribal members—because Indigenous peoples in the United States wouldn't be granted citizenship until 1924. Blacks were also denied citizenship because the United States still had free states and slave states and Congress was debating whether these new territories would be slave or free.
The acquisition is cited as one of the flashpoints for the slavery-incited Civil War.
Speaking Of Land Acquisitions…
The United States has a long history of reacquiring (stealing) land previously set aside by legally binding treaties whenever it wanted a state college (that's what “land grant” university means), a military base, a federal prison, a state or national park, etc…
The Trump administration’s new joint venture with Republican Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, disgustingly dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” is on unceded Indigenous land.
Like Ellsworth Air Force Base, Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe Paha (Mt. Rushmore National Park), and Custer State Park in South Dakota which were all built on Lakȟóta treaty lands—without consultation, permission, or compensation in the sacred Paha Sapa (Black Hills), this latest migrant concentration camp is being created on land sacred to the Seminole and Miccosukee Tribal Nations.
Both tribes are part of a confederation of tribal nations labeled by colonizers as the “Five Civilized Tribes” due to peaceful, cooperative coexistence until the U.S. government decided to relocate them from the southeast to Oklahoma via the Trail of Tears death march.
Those that evaded the forces of then General Andrew Jackson still make the Everglades their home on treaty lands that have been chipped away to fulfill state and federal government wants and wishlists.
According to the tribes, they found out about the latest encroachment on their land via social media posts by government entities and officials.
As Indian Country Today reported:
“Tribes in Florida say a migrant detention center in the Everglades, known as 'Alligator Alcatraz,' will not only affect its members but the delicate ecosystem.”
The Miccosukee, also referred to as the Creek, are now split between the traditional Florida Everglades homelands of their allies, the Seminole, and Oklahoma. The Seminole were the most successful among their confederation in pushing back against Jackson's attempts to relocate or exterminate them because of their superior skills in the swamps and mangroves that have been their home for millennia.
Seminole and Miccosukee traditional territories and sacred ceremonial sites are located near the new detention facility that Kristi Noem, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are crowing about being created in the Everglades west of Miami.
Seminole Tribe of Florida citizen and 2019-2021 Miss Indian World, Cheyenne Kippenberger, told ICT News:
“It hurts. It hurts because that’s our home. The Everglades is our home, and it has been our home for generations, long before it was a National Preserve, long before Florida ever even existed.”
“It is a fragile, beautiful, essential ecosystem that has provided our people with sustenance and safety.”
The largest portion of the Miccosukee lands is called Alligator Alley Reservation at the extreme western part of Broward County. Alcatraz Island was occupied by Indigenous activists for 19 months beginning in November 1969 to bring awareness to government land grabs.
Dubbing this newest concentration camp Alligator Alcatraz just adds insult to insult, not injury, and the pettiness is probably deliberate.
Who's Running The Show?
There's a well-documented history of bad blood between MAGA Republican President Donald Trump and Indigenous peoples.
It began in May 1993 with Trump filing a lawsuit against the government over the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) of 1988. He argued tribal gaming was unconstitutional and racial discrimination (against him).
That led to Trump whining to the House Natural Resources sub-committee on Native American Affairs about Indian gaming rights in October 1993. Trump decided he had something to say about who looked “like an Indian” to him.
From his love of Andrew Jackson to his repeated use of Pocahontas as a slur despite the National Congress of American Indians formally asking him not to, it's not hard to find evidence of Trump’s racism and overall ignorance in regard to Indigenous Americans.
Trump's pick for the Department of Homeland Security, South Dakota Republican Governor since 2019, Kristi Noem, was widely criticized for her track record with the Indigenous peoples of her state—and her propensity to murder puppies and goats.
When the pandemic hit the nation, tribal governments in South Dakota closed their borders and set up checkpoints for entry onto their lands. Noem threatened to use the state police and National Guard to reopen their borders because it countered her “no masks, no problem” stance for the state.
State governments have no jurisdiction over Indigenous reservations and tribal lands.
As governor, Noem also claimed—without any evidence—that reservations were run by South and Central American drug cartels. Noem was trying to encourage border patrol and ICE to take action in her state, which fell outside the jurisdiction of both agencies.
Relations with Noem deteriorated to the point that all nine tribes in South Dakota banned her from setting foot on their land by May of 2024.
Why The Animosity?
Indigenous peoples present a unique challenge to White nationalism. If your entire premise is White is right, brown/Black is bad, how do you address the fact you're the Johnny-come-lately on the continent?
Project 2025, the Trump administration, MAGA, and the Republican Party don't have any issues with immigration. They have issues with non-White immigration.
Trump literally promoted a fictional White genocide in South Africa, then imported unvetted White “farmers” into the country. Most proved to not be farmers and several had White supremacist, antisemitic ties.
As the global minority (White people) has long held the financial and power majority through their acts of invasion and colonization, there aren't a lot of places where White people are anxious to emigrate to the United States.
People in destabilized colonized countries are more eager to emigrate. And a lot of them are Indigenous peoples of the Americas.
But how can a White power base vilify brown people when it’s got its own homegrown crop? To be fair, the colonial governments and then the United States government did try to kill all of us for several centuries.
Remember, Indigenous peoples weren't citizens or allowed to become citizens in their own homelands until 1924.
Then the government tried to erase us through assimilation. It resulted in the loss of some languages and traditions and many lighter shades of pale face among Indigenous peoples—“full-blooded” became rarer and rarer.
But we're still here.
So in the last few years, White nationalists, White supremacists, and even some Christian nationalists have begun claiming to be “native American.” They claim having been born in the United States—isn't that birthright citizenship‽—entitles them to that identity.
At a public event in October 2024, Idaho Republican state Senator Dan Foreman told Indigenous candidate Trish Carter-Goodheart to “go back” to where she came from.
Foreman is a White man born in Illinois. Carter-Goodheart is Nimiipuu—a member of the Nez Perce Tribe—and the state of Idaho "encompasses the traditional home of the Kootenai, Coeur d’Alene, Nez Perce, Lemhi, Shoshone Bannock, and Shoshone Paiute tribes, from time immemorial.”
The voter forum was taking place not just on her ancestral Nez Perce homelands, but also a few miles from the place she and her family are from and have owned land for generations.
None of which mattered to Foreman. After storming out of the event, the self-described Christian nationalist stated in a Facebook post:
“I was born in America, and I am therefore a native American.”
He also followed the bigots’ playbook of crying victim and calling Carter-Goodheart racist. Then he spouted a bunch of misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic drivel.
These right-wing extremists are being encouraged to claim Native American ethnicity/race on any documents that ask for it, including polls and any government forms or websites and online forums.
I find myself increasingly met with claims that there's “no such thing as Native Americans” because everyone born in America is native American—again they argue in favor of birthright citizenship when it suits their needs.
It's part of a pattern being recognized around the globe where settler colonial powers seek to retain their grip.
As Māori poet and activist Jesse Wiremu Wynyard pointed out.
Indigenous peoples stand in the way of White privilege over lands where White people in power are the colonizer, the settler, and the immigrant, but never the native.
Vilifying Indigenous peoples from the Americas serves their purpose. Erasing Indigenous Americans from national parks, museums, government websites, and classrooms serves their purpose.
Don't feed the beast—resist.
Learn about the Indigenous peoples where you live and across Turtle Island. Then tell your family and friends what you learned. Push back against racist and xenophobic narratives that pit White against Black and brown.
The No Kings protests were an excellent example of what to do.
It's important to remember the cause of all of this is fear.
Entitled, privileged, White people in positions of power are frightened. Desperate times call for desperate measures and right now they're acting very desperate—because they know the end is nigh.
It’s not an accident that Donald Trump’s White Christian nationalist majorities in Congress just passed his ridiculously named One Big Beautiful budget Bill that will supercharge ICE to the tune of $170 billion, which The Guardian describes as:
“…a staggering sum that would make US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the federal government, and that critics warn will unleash more raids, disrupt the economy and severely restrict access to humanitarian protections like asylum.”
The good news is Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill is historically unpopular.
With 16 months to go until the midterm elections, there is time to get changemakers on ballots and run against the Republicans—and primary ineffective Democrats—who voted for or enabled this monstrosity.
Those in power know people are waking up to the fact they only have the power we've let them have. No Kings made it clear there are more of us than them, but change will only happen if we use our own power.
The power of the people.
~~~~~~~~~~