ICE Officers Discover Indigenous People Have IDs, Apparently
When ICE agents encounter an Indigenous person on their own ancestral lands, their internal scripting apparently short-circuits. Actor Kwana Martinez's Coquille Indian Tribe ID was 'fake news' to agents seemingly more familiar with targeting brown people than respecting treaty rights. This isn't just about an ID; it's a centuries-old pattern where the US government, through agencies like ICE,
dictates who is 'real' and whose land claims are valid, selectively forgetting inconvenient truths about its own founding. One might wonder if ICE's training manual includes a chapter on 'Recognizing the Original Landowners.' Or perhaps, like so many other US policies, the goal has always been to dispossess and destabilize, irrespective of documentation, especially when it challenges the federal
bureaucracy's presumed authority. It's almost as if the 'border' is an invention, and the people crossing it have always been here.