ICE Detains Oglala Sioux, Forgetting 'Immigration' Predates 1492
The Oglala Sioux Tribe is challenging ICE for illegally holding four of their members in Minneapolis, asserting that tribal citizens are 'not aliens' and outside immigration jurisdiction. This comes after ICE agents, in what critics call racial profiling, have reportedly targeted Native Americans since the Trump administration. Axios notes ICE 'can arrest U.S. citizens in some cases' but 'can't
place U.S. citizens in immigration detention' once citizenship is verified—a bureaucratic loophole that conveniently ignores the Oglala peoples' ancestral land claims. One might wonder if ICE consults a map from before, say, 1800, to understand who the original inhabitants of Minneapolis were. It's a cruel irony that an agency created to manage the movement of people across borders now attempts to
define the status of those whose sovereignty long predates the very concept of those borders. Perhaps ICE should bone up on the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty before raiding Little Earth, or maybe they just missed the email about the whole 'First Nations' thing. It appears their operational definition of 'borders' conveniently starts when it suits their funding.