ICE Is So Bad At Immigration Enforcement That It’s Detaining Native Americans

Trump’s version of ICE has always assumed that if your skin shade is anything darker than right-wing podcaster translucent, your ass needs to be gone from this country.

Obviously, that’s not how things are supposed to work here in America, which proudly considered itself to be a melting pot (albeit belatedly and after a lot of post-Civil War legislation and jurisprudence). What makes America great is the blend of people in it. And, because this nation is so large, there’s plenty of room for everyone and no non-bigot will ever claim the addition of migrants has somehow made us weaker.

ICE has always been awful. It’s been even worse recently, now that it knows no one in the administration will ever prevent it from being the racist throwback Trump clearly wishes it to be. It’s even bolder now that the Supreme Court — via Justice Kavanaugh’s shadow docket concurrence — said it’s ok to engage in racial profiling.

Racial profiling should be illegal. It isn’t. Among the many problems with racial profiling is that when you’re just looking for people with darker skin, you tend to do absurdly stupid shit like this:

Federal agents have detained a handful of Native Americans amid the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota.

The detention of at least five men in and around Minneapolis has sparked an outcry among Native American groups about Indigenous people being racially profiled as undocumented immigrants by federal immigration agents. Minneapolis is one of the largest urban centers for Native Americans in the United States.

When you’re rounding up Native Americans, you’re rounding up the people who have done the least amount of immigration ever. Anyone engaged in these arrests has migrated more times than the people they’re arresting. This — along with the recent murder of Minnesota native and US citizen Renee Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross — should have been enough to make ICE tuck its tail between its legs and head off to a more receptive, red-coded locality.

It didn’t. And because ICE neither understands nor cares, it’s up to regular American citizens to point out the obvious:

“It is deeply offensive and ironic that the first people of this land would be subjected to questions around their citizenship,” Jacqueline De Leon, senior staff attorney at the nonprofit Native American Rights Fund and a member of the Isleta Pueblo. “Yet nevertheless, that is exactly what we’re seeing.”

You’d think someone at ICE might want to pull back and reassess the situation, especially now that seemingly the entirety of the city of Minneapolis is willing to hassle officers into abandoning the random roll-ups on darker skinned people they constantly claim are “targeted stops.”

If these truly were “targeted stops,” they wouldn’t have targeted people who have far more right to be here than the people detaining them. Jose Rodriguez, a 20-year-old Red Lake Nation descendant, was arrested by ICE in what ICE claims was a “high-risk immigration enforcement stop.” (The officers also claimed to have been “violently assaulted” by Rodriguez but, tellingly, no charges have been filed.)

This was followed up by the detaining of four unhoused tribal members by ICE officers, who found them sleeping under a bridge and decided this — combined with presumably darker-than-white skin tones — was all that was needed to justify some “papers please” hassling, immediately followed by detentions that, at press time (January 14) still hadn’t been ended. (One of the four was released prior to publishing.)

And it’s not like Native Americans didn’t see this coming. They read the Kavanaugh concurrence and saw what’s been happening all over this nation (but especially in “blue” states) and let their fellow Americans know that they should expect ICE to treat them like any other “brown” person officers come across:

A day before Ramirez’s stop, the Red Lake Tribal Council issued a Jan. 7 advisory about the Trump administration’s enforcement in Minnesota. “We all need to be extra careful, and we must assume that ICE will not protect us,” the advisory said.

It’s been obvious since the inception of this so-called “immigration enforcement” surge: anyone not white would be rounded up. The Supreme Court said this is all very cool and very lawful. And the surge in Minnesota is proving that being white is no protection either, not if you’re opposed to what this regime is doing. With threats of a military deployment to Minnesota looming, no American worth their citizenship should continue pretending this is anything more than white nationalism draping itself in executive power.