A Cruel Irony: Native Americans Profiled as 'Aliens' by ICE

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Jan 19, 2026

In a nation as diverse as ours, immigration enforcement inevitably tests whether equal protection means what it says. Some tribal leaders in the Upper Midwest say that test is being failed in the wake of the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis on Jan. 7.

By the end of the week, claims of aggressive immigration enforcement actions, including door-to-door operations in some neighborhoods, poured in of agents not only tracking down those without legal status to reside in the U.S. but also questioning and detaining others, whether they were legal residents or citizens or not. Social media platforms were filled with video clips not only of Good’s killing but also of federal agents doing sidewalk and parking lot interrogations of Black, Latino and other non-white residents. Masked and kitted out for combat, the agents give the impression of being law unto themselves as they demand to see identification papers.

On Jan. 10, the tribal governing board of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, based in northern Wisconsin, stated it was “closely monitoring recent events that took place in Minneapolis, and around the country involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agents.”

That vigilance was not misplaced.

On Jan. 9, Oglala Sioux Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out stated on Facebook that ICE had detained four homeless members of his tribe in Minneapolis, as CBS reported. The Department of Homeland Security disavowed any knowledge of detaining members of the Sioux nation, and Star Comes Out did not give the full names of the detained men. DHS told The Wall Street Journal it could not verify that any tribe members were arrested.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported that Jose Roberto “Beto” Ramirez, 20, a descendant of the Red Lake Nation of Ojibwe in Minnesota, was pulled out of a car in a Twin Cities suburb, roughed up, handcuffed and detained at ICE’s headquarters in Minneapolis.

Last year at this time, Navajo Nation officials were reporting that tribal citizens were being detained in Arizona and New Mexico.

For me, this reporting is not abstract. As an African American man, it has hit me like a blast from America’s past: the bad old days of Jim Crow segregation.

It also reminded me of the bad old days of being a reporter in South Africa in the mid-1970s during the era of racist apartheid before Nelson Mandela was released and elected president.

As a reporter who looked undeniably Black, I prudently carried my U.S. passport in my pocket just in case I was stopped by the authorities for the crime of reporting-while-Black.

Worse, as a long-time police beat reporter, I am appalled by the behavior of some federal agents I have seen. The worst appear to be more interested in fulfilling quotas than fighting crime.

And then there’s the gaslighting by the Trump administration. Leave aside the question of whether ICE agent Jonathan Ross felt he was in danger when he pulled the trigger to kill Good. Administration officials immediately set about characterizing Good as a terrorist, portraying other activists monitoring ICE actions as “paid,” and claiming that the door-to-door raids are really about investigating “fraud, human smuggling and unlawful employment practices.”

Racial profiling has long been a feature of law enforcement in the United States, and it persists despite periodic attempts to root it out. I don’t need to detail here the stress, anxiety and other ill effects it is known to cause (including post-traumatic stress disorder). These are well known.

What needs to be said is that these psychological wounds — the fear, alienation and mistrust they inspire in the victims — appear to be a central objective of Trump’s Department of Homeland Security at the moment.

Civil-rights advocates argue that the Supreme Court’s stay in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo effectively allows immigration agents to resume practices that critics call racial profiling, intensifying concerns about unchecked enforcement.

Such raids are a grave threat to half a century of progress toward racial peace and understanding in this country, and an insult to the people who were on this land first.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at clarence47page@gmail.com.)