Freedom to Move
Freedom to Stay
Freedom to Return
NoBorders/LandBack
Intro
From the streets of Minneapolis and Los Angeles to the streets of Palestine, we are constantly reminded that the category of ‘migrant’ (or ‘refugee’) and that of ‘Native’ are not mutually exclusive. They never have been. Their borders crossed us and we’ve also crossed their borders. Remember Louis Riel and Little Bear seeking refuge in “Montana”; Sitting Bull and Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt (Chief Joseph) seeking the same in “Saskatchewan”, and much later, Leonard Peltier seeking refuge in “Alberta”; among other examples.
Some of our stories, including some of our origin stories, are tales of migration. Since before colonialism, we’ve always moved around, made new connections, and made new places our homes as part of making those relations. This doesn’t make us any less Indigenous; it’s part of what makes us Indigenous.
The colonizer’s imposed borders restrict our movements within our own homelands, and prohibit us from welcoming our kin from other places. Settler colonialism has always confined us in various ways and forced us to move to restricted areas, often at the cost of many lives. This system has made us refugees in our own territories, and in the lands of others, but we’ve always resisted and sought ways to get around and escape their restrictions.
We can’t stop racial profiling and other harms by saying “hey, we’re the good ones, we’re the ones who belong.” We can only stop this by opposing all white supremacist systems of control that oppress our people as well as others. It is in our own interest as Native peoples to act in solidarity with (other) migrants, and it’s in the interests of migrants to act in solidarity with (other) Indigenous peoples.
An injury to one is an injury to all. Until every border falls.
-Ed. (âpihtawikosisân), 2026
Other sites
AIM Patrol Minneapolis, by the Minnesota Historical Society
We Are Here: Indigenous Diaspora in Los Angeles
Mapping Deportations: Unmasking the History of Racism in U.S. Immigration Enforcement
Myth: Palestinian refugees are unique, by Decolonize Palestine
Stories & Statements
In reverse chronology
“He said he told them ‘I have bills and I have kids’… That’s when one of the officers or agents responded with ‘we’re going to get them, too.’”
ICE agents detain Navajo man in Peoria, ignoring US, tribal IDs, by Arlyssa D. Becenti (2026)
“We stand with our neighbors—whatever their country of birth—who are getting ripped away from their families or violently apprehended for their lawful efforts to protect their communities.”
Native American Rights Fund statement on unlawful ICE activity (2026)
“This act of violence was completely unacceptable and inhumane. In addition, we are now seeing federal immigration enforcement activity extend onto tribal lands, where tribal members are being stopped, questioned, and harassed across Indian Country.”
Statement from the Office of the Principal Chief of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma (2026)
“The Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians issued a warning to tribal members Thursday about ICE enforcement, stating that federal ‘racial profiling practices’ have included Native Americans as a class subject to stops ‘based on perceived ethnicity, language, or occupation.’”
Grand Traverse Band Issues Warning to Tribal Members About ICE Enforcement, by Beth Milligan (2026)
“In response to Native Americans being stopped by ICE, several Wisconsin tribes issued statements voicing concern over the stops and also offering advice to their members.”
Wisconsin tribes react after ICE detains Native Americans in Twin Cities, by Frank Zufall (2026)
“The Tribe wants to be clear: we do not support or cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Our priority is the safety, dignity, and protection of our Tribal members.”
Statement by the Lac Du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians (2026)
“Johnson’s statement says Tribal Members were accosted by officers using unconstitutional racial profiling techniques, and also says there is no reasonable basis, suspicion, or probable cause to restrict the liberties of Native Americans based on skin color, hair color, eye color or a lack of identification.”
“No one should feel unsafe in their neighborhood, workplace, or homeland because of how they look, the language they speak, or the country they were born in.”
“In recent weeks, heightened tensions have emerged as U.S. ICE agents have stopped and detained tribal members and tribal descendants, raising urgent concerns about dignity, safety, and respect for Native American citizens,” wrote Bay Mills Indian Community President Whitney Gravelle.
Michigan Native American tribes warn about ICE. What they’re telling members, by Dan Basso (2026)
“Senior staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, Jacqueline De León, said federal immigration agents racial profiling Native Americans is one of the consequences of recent decisions by the Supreme Court around the use of ethnicity in immigration steps.”
‘A deep irony’: Native American legal expert weighs in on racial profiling, by Melissa Olson (2026)
“The Spirit Lake Nation and Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate in a joint statement with the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe said ICE’s activities in Minnesota have ’caused fear and uncertainty’ among their citizens. The joint statement also condemned the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent on Wednesday.”
Native leaders in North Dakota urge use of tribal IDs, denounce ICE tactics, by Mary Steurer (2026)
“Native American community leaders and members gathered on Friday in south Minneapolis to share prayer, support and solidarity amid the surge of ICE operations.”
“We, as well as many Indigenous Nations and organizations across the United States have been monitoring this issue and the reprehensible actions of ICE agents, especially those that now appear to be targeting indigenous peoples”
“At least five Native American men have been detained and an unknown number questioned by immigration officers across the Minneapolis area in the midst of what a top official called the ‘largest immigration raid ever.’”
Five Native Americans detained by ICE during ongoing raids in Minneapolis, by Amelia Schafer (2026)
“Studies show that the return of land to tribes provides the best outcomes for the climate.”
“The petition says that these detention centers ‘go against ancestral values of responsibility, human dignity, and respect. This line of business is an unjust investment on many levels, including adjacency to work that co-signs ICE methods including lack of due process for detainment, incarceration and rampant mistreatment of thousands of Indigenous relatives from Central and South America.'”
“I hold a position which requires me to work with government and find solutions. I will not be found sitting anywhere with ICE at the table.”
Statement by the President of the Ho-Chunk Nation (2026)
“The Oneida Business Committee condemns OESC’s action to enter a contract for ICE facilities and we believe such actions hinder teaching our values to the next seven generations if its employees, representatives, or corporations do not abide by those values today.”
“I clicked on the article. It barely mentioned my community. Instead, it analyzed which letters the tweet had capitalized and how those letters corresponded to neo-Nazi slogans.”
Erasure is how anti-Indigenous racism works, by Rebecca Nagle (2025)
“Miles alleges that a similar thing has happened to her son and uncle – they have previously been detained and later released by ICE officers who would not initially accept their tribal identification.”
“WHEREAS, in times of war and similar emergencies, Indian lands are targeted for government use, just as the Gila River Indian Community, Ward Lake near Ketchikan, Alaska, and Colorado River Indian Tribes were forced to play host to Japanese Internment Camps; and…”
“I kept trying to explain to them that I’m Native American,” she said.
‘We can’t have this happen again’: Salt River Pima citizen nearly deported, by Amelia Schafer (2025)
“The Nisqually people are not in favor of, nor will the tribal council allow, the detention of individuals by ICE on our reservation or in our facilities,” said Tribal Chair E.K. Choke in the statement
ICE looks to WA tribes to house detained immigrant, by Nina Shapiro (2025)
“Indigenous people have been subjected to forced removal and mistreatment within government-funded facilities for generations. ICE detainments are not isolated incidents; they are part of a long and painful continuum of racially targeted government actions.”
“When the Supreme Court recently allowed immigration agents in the Los Angeles area to take race into consideration during sweeps, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that citizens shouldn’t be concerned.”
“Kordia, a Palestinian who has lived in New Jersey since 2016, was one of the first arrested in the government’s campaign against protesters, many of them prominent activists. All the others have gained release.”
The only protester still locked up…, by Jake Offenhartz and Adam Geller (2025)
“The call to rescind those medals is not about erasing history, but about refusing to let lies and conquest define it.”
With Wounded Knee Medals, Admin Suggests There’s Valor in Genocide, by Johnnie Jae (2025)
“We write as Indigenous women, Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer people grounded in our responsibilities to our Peoples and lands, to raise our voices in solidarity with the people of Palestine.”
Indigenous Women: Letter of Solidarity with Humanitarian Flotilla (2025)
“The Everglades is meant for our tribes, it protects life, it shields it. It’s not meant to detain life,” Troy Sanders says.
“The tribe, whose territory is adjacent to the immigration detention facility in the Florida Everglades, joined a lawsuit against the state and federal governments on July 14.”
“Leo Costello, chair of Rice University’s art history department, said the painting is a visual representation of the idea of Manifest Destiny, which held it was the divine purpose and right of European-descended settlers to spread across North American for the progress of civilizations as they saw it.”
“Border restrictions [are] ‘not to the benefit of Inuit,’ Beveridge said.”
Love at the Border, by Sarah Rogers (2025)
“Many of those workers formed part of a close-knit community, with ties to the same indigenous Zapotec town in Veracruz, Mexico.”
After ICE raids in LA, families of those detained are desperate for answers, by Vanessa Romo (2025)
“The Kumeyaay people once moved freely across the mountainous and coastal regions of what is now northern Baja California (Baja California Norte), in Mexico, and parts of California and Arizona, in the United States.”
“James Mast, a Cree Sixties Scoop survivor, says he was making his way to Oklahoma so he could care for his ailing adoptive father when tribal police on the U.S. side of the Akwesasne reservation arrested him and turned him over to U.S. Border Patrol.”
“In order to live by miyo-wîcêhtowin and wîtaskêwin, we need to live in good relations to Indigenous Peoples locally and globally.”
Treaty Responsibilities to Palestine, by Jessica Johns (2025)
“One Navajo Nation official said that ‘many fear for the threat of being deported.’”
Over 15 Navajo Nation Members Swept Up in Immigration Raids, by
“This event is an annual celebration of the rights of all Indigenous peoples of North America to cross the border between Canada and the United States freely.”
“The expansion of Anglo-American settlement into the Trans-Appalachian west led to the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, forcing all eastern tribal nations to move to new homelands west of the Mississippi River in the Indian Territory.”
Removal of Tribal Nations to Oklahoma, by the Oklahoma Historical Society (2024)
“Native people are incarcerated in state and federal prisons at a rate of 763 per 100,000 people. This is double the national rate (350 per 100,000) and more than four times higher than the state and federal prison incarceration rate of white people (181 per 100,000).”
Native incarceration in the U.S., by the Prison Policy Initiative (2023)
“But bisected by the line, Crees became asylum-seekers on their own lands 150 years ago. Though some were granted political refugee status, Crees were still denied basic rights. Instead, many were killed, ignored and deported on both sides of the border.”
Ignored and deported, Cree ‘refugees’ echo the crises of today, by Brenden Rensink (2019)
“In the midst of the legislative battle over the equal rights bill, Alberta Schenck, a seventeen-year old with a white father and a native mother, was arrested for sitting in the ‘whites only’ section of Nome’s movie theater in March 1944. (This was eleven years before Rosa Parks’s famous refusal to sit in the back of a Montgomery bus.)”
Alaska’s Unique Civil Rights Struggle, by Matthew Wills (2018)
“And what you may not know is that the federal policy of Indian removal, which ranged far beyond the Trail of Tears and the Cherokee, was not simply the vindictive scheme of Andrew Jackson, but rather a popularly endorsed, congressionally sanctioned campaign spanning the administrations of nine separate presidents.”
How Native American Slaveholders Complicate the Trail of Tears Narrative, by Ryan P. Smith (2018)
“The Dakota 38 refers to thirty-eight Dakota men who were executed by hanging, under orders from President Abraham Lincoln.”
38, written and read by Layli Long Soldier (2017)
“A larger group made up of Native Americans from the county and the surrounding area descended on the gathering and confronted the Klan. Outnumbered, the Klan members fled from the field. After that night, the Klan never held another public gathering in Robeson County.”
“Aleuts were kept in camps as late as 1945—two full years after Japanese troops left the Aleutian Islands. Those who survived the war went home to find their villages burned and destroyed.”
The U.S. Forcibly Detained Native Alaskans During World War II, by Erin Blakemore (2017)
“There is no simple binary between countries that produce refugees, and those that care for them.”
Little Bear’s Cree and Canada’s Uncomfortable History of Refugee Creation, by Bejamin Hoy (2015)
“Although the Indian Removal Act was aimed mainly at the Indian nations in the South, it was also used to negotiate removal treaties with the Shawnee, Sauk and Fox, Potawatomie, Ottawa, Omaha, Miami and other smaller tribes.”
The Indian Removal Act of 1830, by The Native History Association (2014)
“Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life. Thus contests for land can be—indeed, often are—contests for life.”
Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native, by Patrick Wolfe (2006)
“First, its recasting of the history of Western Civilization helps us locate the origins of fascism within colonialism itself; hence, within the very traditions of humanism, critics believed fascism threatened.”
A Poetics of Anticolonialism, by Robin D.G. Kelley (1999)
“Why, after killing an Indian, was an avowed political racist charged with manslaughter instead of murder and sentenced to a short prison term?”
The Killing of Leo LaChance, by Ron Bourgeault (1994)
“A federal appeals court Tuesday rejected a claim of U.S. citizenship by people born in the Philippines before the islands gained independence in 1946.”
Court Rejects Filipinos’ Bid for U.S. Citizenship, by the Associated Press (1994)
“This violent state repression consisted of dozens of murders and assaults, including an assault on a non-Native legal defence team.”
Chronology of Oppression at Pine Ridge, from Victims of Progress (1977)
“When World War II broke out, Greenland came under the ‘protection’ of the USA, which constructed military airbases in south, west, and north Greenland. In return for the ‘protection,’ the US got cryolite, a resource vital to the military industry.”
The Inuit of Greenland: A Brief History, by Malik (1975)
“The longest war that the United States government has ever waged has been against the American Indians. The war has never ceased.”
Wounded Knee: The Longest War 1890-1973, from Black Flag (1974)
“Colonial expansion did not come about because of the need for markets for surplus production. On the contrary, surplus production came about as a result of colonial expansion.”
Capitalism, the Final Stage of Exploitation, by Lee Carter [AKA Maracle] (1970)
“On the other hand, there is no doubt that the majority of Zionists regard the Arabs in the same way as other colonisers have regarded other ‘native inhabitants’…”
Palestine, by Albert Meltzer (1948)
“Yet, England has in Palestine a base for expansion into Asia Minor and will not give up its policy of protection for Zionism.”
Bloodied Palestine, by Camillo Berneri (1929)
“…give them back their homes and lands that have been taken away from them by force…”
The Pacification of the Yaqui, by Librado Rivera (1927)
“The end which our enemies have in view is plain. Their object is to prevent good people from extending to us their sympathy while they themselves may rob us in the dark and murder us without pity.”
An Appeal for Justice, by Louis Riel (1885)
“It will relieve the whole State of Mississippi and the western part of Alabama of Indian occupancy, and enable those States to advance rapidly in population, wealth, and power.”
Andrew Jackson’s Speech on the Indian Removal Act – Annotated, by Liz Tracey (1830/2024)
Quotes
“In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States or remove beyond the Missisipi. The former is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves. But in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only.”
President Thomas Jefferson to Governor of the Indiana Territory William Henry Harrison (1803)
“Hence the Prince that acquires new Territory, if he finds it vacant, or removes the Natives to give his own People Room; the Legislator that makes effectual Laws for promoting of Trade… may be properly called Fathers of their Nation…”
Pennsylvania Assembly Member Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, Etc. (1751)
Also
What is Fascism? What is Democratic Colonialism?
Anarchists & Fellow Travellers on Palestine
Anarchism & Indigenous Peoples
