Above photo: Picture of Leticia Jacobo.
The New Erasure of Native Americans through Immigration.
Leticia Jacobo was scheduled to be released from Polk County Jail in Des Moines, Iowa, after being booked in for a traffic violation. Instead, the 24-year-old Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community citizen was scheduled for deportation.
Last week, ICE raided Little Earth, a Native community of South Minneapolis, Minnesota, detaining at least 5 Native American men. ICE agents even tried to forcibly detain Rachel Dionne-Thunder, who is Plains Cree and the co-founder of Indigenous Protectors Movement, out of her vehicle.
The Sheriff’s Department marked Jacobo as an undocumented immigrant to be sent into ICE custody, although her Tribal ID proved she is a Tribal citizen, and therefore a U.S. citizen.
The Supreme Court’s decision supporting racial profiling encourages ICE to question, detain, or attempt to deport Native Americans. Yet something much more concerning is at play: the Exclusive Citizenship Act, a bill introduced in Congress on December 1, 2025.
Jacobo, as other Indigenous people in the United States, holds dual citizenship, receiving citizenship from both her tribal and the federal government. This dual status was imposed in 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act that forcibly turned all tribal citizens into U.S. citizens.
A century later, the Exclusive Citizenship Act seeks to ban dual or multiple citizenship for all U.S. citizens, requiring current dual citizens to either renounce their foreign citizenship or their U.S. citizenship. For Native Americans, it could imply choosing between assimilation or their Tribal identity.
Rejecting their U.S. citizenship could turn Indigenous peoples into non-citizens or even undocumented immigrants in the eyes of ICE, making them easy targets for arbitrary detentions and deportations.
ICE is opening a new chapter in an old settler colonial strategy of dispossession masquerading as law. From the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which forcibly relocated Indigenous peoples from ancestral lands to reservations, to the Exclusive Citizenship Act, the goal is still to erase and replace.
Jacobo’s attempted deportation is a warning for new tactics of removal. This time, removal is being attempted through the immigration system.
ICE Against Indigenous Peoples
ICE attacks on Tribal citizens are increasing. On January 23, 2025, the Navajo Tribal leaders reported receiving calls and text messages from Navajo citizens in urban areas who had been stopped, questioned, or detained by ICE.
The Navajo Council’s press release stated that “Despite possessing Certificates of Indian Blood (CIBs) and state-issued IDs, several individuals have been detained or questioned by ICE agents who do not recognize these documents as valid proof of citizenship.”
The Trump administration’s intensification of deportation efforts, paired with the official endorsement of detainment through racial profiling by the Supreme Court, has made ICE into a dangerous tool that threatens Indigenous peoples.
Elaine Miles, an Indigenous actor known for her roles in “Northern Exposure,” “Smoke Signals,” Wyvern”, and “The Last of Us,” experienced blatant rejection of her tribal ID from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. When Miles was ordered to hand her ID, ICE agents dismissed her tribal ID as “fake” while another said, “Anyone can make that.”
Miles claims that agents refused to call the Umatilla enrollment office phone number printed on the back of Miles’ ID as she urged them to prove its validity. They let her go after a fifth agent from an unidentified black SUV prompted the group to leave abruptly.
ICE agents’ refusal to recognize Miles’ Tribal ID despite being recognized by federal agencies reflects a broader ignorance about Tribal citizenship as well as the danger racial profiling poses for Native Americans.
Seattle-based Indigenous rights attorney Gabriel Galanda notes that “The prospect of the First Peoples being physically or forcibly stopped or detained is harrowing and reminiscent of this country’s original treatment of the First Peoples.”
These incidents reflect the long-standing pattern of dismissing Tribal documents as invalid. It’s the ongoing settler colonial pattern of undermining Native sovereignty.
Contested Citizenships, from 1924 to 2025
The pattern started through forced assimilation. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act into law. The Act automatically granted Indigenous peoples born in the United States full citizenship without having to give up their Tribal citizenship. Since then, recognized Tribal citizens hold dual citizenship, to their nation and to the U.S. federal government.
Indigenous peoples reluctantly pushed for that dual citizenship because they lacked the legal tools for protecting themselves in a system designed to erase them. Settler laws criminalized Indigenous Identity, their languages and religious practices, family structure, and political organization. Boarding schools sought to “kill the Indian and save the man,” while policies were intended to assimilate Indigenous peoples as U.S. farmers.
Even with U.S. citizenship, Indigenous peoples lacked voting rights. It took decades for all 50 states to grant Indigenous peoples’ right to suffrage. Many states found other ways to deny Indigenous suffrage, although the 15th Amendment prohibits the denial of the right to vote based on race. States used reasons such as residence on a reservation, tribal enrollment status, taxation, and racist narratives of “incompetency” to disenfranchise Indigenous peoples.
Today, American citizenship granted by the Act continues to fail at guaranteeing Indigenous suffrage. Indigenous peoples continue to fight for an equal, full right to vote across Indian Country. Restrictions on Indigenous voting exist to weaken Indigenous agency in elections.
The 2025 bill contains no explanation of what ‘foreign citizenship’ means, whether it would include citizenship to Indigenous Nations, or how it would impact the “domestic dependent nations” established by the U.S. Supreme Court in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831).
Why does it matter? Because the bill can be weaponized to reject Tribal citizenship, granting the U.S. government a bypass to steal nearly 56 million acres of Indigenous land.
Forcing Native Americans to give up their Tribal citizenship is a form of sovereign dispossession that facilitates a federal land-grab. Without Tribal citizens, the United States could freely grab, sell, or cede millions of acres of reservation land.
Why Elk V. Wilkins still matters
Before the Indian Citizenship Act was signed 101 years ago, Indigenous peoples were denied citizenship in the United States Constitution first, and later in the 14th Amendment through Elk V. Wilkins in 1884.
In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that under the 14th Amendment, John Elk was not a U.S. citizen because he was born as a member of the Winnebago tribe. The ruling reinforced the intentional separation of Indigenous peoples as a political group, barring them from becoming citizens in the United States.
Indigenous peoples rights were placed further under Congress’s control because, as non-citizens, they could not protest the United States’ genocidal removal polices in court. Indigenous peoples were forced to obtain citizenship through Congressional approval. It was an easy way to erase Indigenous peoples by denying them citizenship.
The case is being used now by Trump’s Justice Department to defend the validity of Trump’s executive order. Using Indigenous peoples’ exclusion from the 14th Amendment as an analogy erases the intention behind excluding them from citizenship.
At the same time, legal violence against Native Americans is normalized when using Elk v. Wilkins as an analogy that dismisses their experiences as examples for exclusionary policy.
The Department’s argument relies on using the same discriminatory legal framework used in Elk v. Wilkins that had left generations of Indigenous peoples stateless in their own homelands. What Indigenous peoples experienced is now being repeated with the children of undocumented immigrants.
Who can be a citizen?
Indigenous peoples continue to defend their right to self-determination in the face of a settler colonial state designed to erase them from the map. Whether it is through genocide, forced assimilation, or deportation, they have been treated time and again as foreigners in their own homelands.
Deportations have already affected green card holders, refugees, international students, Latino U.S. citizens, and even children. Native Americans, like immigrants from Venezuela to Sudan, are the new danger.
The claim is still that of protecting U.S. citizens. If, centuries ago, regimes of dispossession were justified to protect citizens from savages, now they attack foreign nationals who are labelled ‘the worst of the worst.’
What do Native Americans and immigrants have in common? Not much, except that both are the designated outsiders and obstacles of white settler states. The Trump administration is using ICE to consolidate an old settler colonial imagination of who can be a citizen. And they are white.
Ultimately, ICE is being used to revive and reinforce the Manifest Destiny of the authoritarian white settler state. One raid at a time.
