Indigenous People and Trump Regime

You can’t say I.C.E. is only after “illegal immigrants” when they are going after those who were here long before any of them knew this land existed.

A portrait of Andrew Jackson, who historian Howard Zinn called “the most aggressive enemy of the Indians in early American history,” now hangs in the Oval Office. Donald Trump said Jackson’s “whole thing was a lot like mine,” and that’s proving to be true in the Trump regime’s treatment of Indigenous people from ICE kidnappings of Native citizens to threats of colonizing Greenland. 

Beginning in early 2025, Indigenous tribes, including the Navajo Nation and Oglala Sioux, have reported the targeting, questioning, and kidnapping of tribal members by ICE agents, who ignore their tribal identification as proof of U.S. citizenship. In addition to being the first peoples on the land now occupied by the United States government, Native Americans are full U.S. citizens under the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. 

Indigenous actress Elaine Miles, made famous by her role as Marilyn Whirlwind in the 1990s TV show Northern Exposure, was approached by ICE agents at a bus stop in Washington and told her tribal identification was “fake,” despite it being issued by the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and recognized as valid by federal agencies.

Miles told KUOW, Seattle’s NPR news station, that a man with a gun in his hand ran up to her while she was waiting for a bus. “And I was looking at him, like, ‘What? What did I do?’ And then he’s like, ‘Are you Mexican?’ And I go, ‘No, I’m not. I’m Native American. You want to see my tribal ID?’ … Then these other men come up. And it’s scary when they run up on you.”

The same KUOW article reports that in November a woman from Arizona’s Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community had an ICE detainer placed on her after a month-long sentence for driving without a license. Her family had to bring her birth certificate to the jail before she was let go. 

Miles told KUOW that what is happening echoes a history of when bounty hunters tracked Native Americans.  

Most recently, four members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe were kidnapped by ICE last week. As of January 13, three of the Indigenous men were still being held at the ICE Detention Center at Fort Snelling, tribal leaders were told, according to a press release by Oglala Sioux Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out. 

Star Comes Out said, “The irony is not lost on us. Lakota citizens who are reported to be held at Fort Snelling—a site forever tied to the Dakota 38+2—underscores why treaty obligations and federal accountability matter today, not just in history.”

The “Dakota 38+2”, to which Star Comes Out refers, is the largest mass execution in U.S. history, carried out December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota. Following the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, Fort Snelling was a concentration camp for about 1,600 Dakota children, women, and elderly men—non-combatants. Hundreds of Dakota men were tried in mass tribunals without legal representation. President Lincoln signed execution orders for 38 of the men who were hanged on a single scaffold. Two prominent Dakota leaders, Medicine Bottle and Shakopee, were later captured and executed at Fort Snelling. 

“The Oglala Sioux Tribe has formally notified senior federal officials that the detention of Oglala Sioux tribal members under federal immigration authority is unlawful and constitutes a direct violation of binding treaties, federal law, constitutional protections, and the United States’ trust responsibility,” the press release states. “The Tribe is demanding immediate federal action and government-to-government consultation.” 

The press release goes on to state that a formal memorandum has been sent to the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “placing the United States on notice of its legal obligations to the Oglala Sioux Tribe as a sovereign Nation.” 

The Oneida Nation has issued a statement declaring that ICE agents are not welcome on their reservation, citing “escalating troubled times” and the refusal to recognize tribal identifications. 

A group of 15 U.S. Senators have urged the Department of Homeland Security to suspend operations on tribal lands until formal consultation protocols—established in a 2022 directive—are followed. Tribal leaders from the Navajo Nation, Standing Rock Sioux, and several Minnesota-based tribes have also implemented “rapid response” protocols to assist members who are wrongfully detained. 

As Indigenous people face this oppression by the Trump regime in the United States, Indigenous people in Greenland are raising alarms about the Trump threat to invade their lands. 

Speaking to the BBC, Morgan Angaju, an Inuit resident of Ilulissat, said it had been “terrifying to listen to the leader of the free world laughing at Denmark and Greenland and just talking about us like we’re something to claim. We are already claimed by the Greenlandic people. Kalaallit Nunaat means the land of the Greenlandic people.”  

Laakkuluk Williamson told the CBC that she fears Greenland will become “the Arctic equivalent of American Samoa or Puerto Rico: U.S. overseas territories where residents lack constitutional protections and representation in Congress.” 

“It’s very scary. It’s very worrisome. It’s terrifying, in fact. I worry about the safety of my family. What are they supposed to do? What are the plans to make sure Inuit are safe in their own homeland?”