The right wants native American Indians defined as immigrants

DemocracySOS -   The Washington Post reports that Native American tribal leaders in Minnesota say that ICE has now begun stopping, questioning, harassing and, in some cases, detaining Native Americans.

Jose Roberto Ramirez, a 20 year old Native American and a US citizen, was forcibly removed from his aunt’s car and detained by masked federal immigration officers in Robbinsdale, Minnesota. A video of his arrest on Thursday, January 8, shows the officers yanking Ramirez from the passenger’s seat, slamming him on the hood of another car, handcuffing him and whisking him away. Amidst panicked screams, the detainee’s aunt tried to inform the kidnappers of her nephew’s American-citizen status.

Ramirez, a descendant of the Red Lake Nation, a federally recognized Ojibwe tribe in northern Minnesota, is among a number of Native Americans who have been swept up in the Minneapolis area during the Trump administration’s surge in immigration kidnapping operations that began late last month, and has escalated since a US citizen, Renee Good, was murdered at point blank range by an ICE agent on January 7.

Minnesota has 11 federally recognized tribes, and around the same time as the Robbinsdale kidnapping, four members of the Oglala Sioux tribe were detained, with three of them still missing deep inside the gulag of the ICE facilities. Earlier in December, the Navajo Nation said dozens of Native Americans were questioned or detained by ICE agents. One detainee was Native American actress Elaine Miles, known from her roles in “Northern Exposure,” “The Last of Us,” and “Smoke Signals,” who said ICE agents approached her near a bus stop, asking for her ID. When she showed them her tribal ID, which is federally recognized, she was harassed by her interrogators saying her ID looked fake.

When asked about why Native Americans – the original Americans -- would be swept up as part of his detention of illegal immigrants, President Donald Trump advanced a new theory.

“Well, you know, Native Americans came here a long time ago, from another place. There was this kind of land bridge -- from Russia – Siberia, they call it there– that they walked across to get here. Walked, can you believe it? Or ran, I’ll bet some of them ran, you know, the tide, it comes up pretty fast in that part of the world. But, technically speaking, they come from somewhere else. And so they also are immigrants to this land. To this country.”

White House deputy chief of staff for homeland security, and American neo-Nazi leader, Stephen Miller, clarified.

“So-called Native Americans have been reclassified as ‘ancient immigrants.’ The current ones are descended from the ones from a long time ago, who were not in fact original to our shores. They were Russians, in fact. It doesn’t matter when you came, you need permission to –”

A CNN reporter interrupted: “But sir, in 1924, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act which guaranteed birthright citizenship to all Native Americans born in the US, so why are —”

“Fake news,” smirked Miller. “To facilitate the proper handling of this ‘ancient immigrant’ problem, we are engaged in a thorough review of all laws and treaties passed before, well, today. I mean, before, like, right now.”