Through a tinted yet clearly visible gas station window only feet away, a Native grandmother was overpowered and swarmed by ICE. This could have been any gas station, but this time it was in Chaparral, New Mexico.
For many, the video is not just about immigration policy; it is a glaring visual of a Native woman being treated as a foreigner on her ancestral homelands.
Chaparral is no stranger to the presence of federal immigration authorities. The rural border community is home to the Otero County Processing Center, a massive facility that houses up to 1,086 immigrants and has been criticized for relying on remote locations lacking community oversight.
However, the detention of Indigenous people by an agency designed to deport undocumented immigrants raises profound constitutional concerns.
The Fourth Amendment protects individuals from unreasonable search and seizure, and federal law prohibits targeting individuals solely based on race or ethnicity. Yet, advocates argue that aggressive immigration enforcement strategies inevitably lead to racial profiling, catching Native Americans in a dragnet meant for others.
The New Normal
The incident in Chaparral is not an isolated event. Over the past year, multiple Native American citizens have been wrongly targeted, detained, or nearly deported by immigration authorities.
Leticia Jacobo (Salt River Pima-Maricopa)
In November, Leticia Jacobo was mistakenly flagged as an undocumented immigrant by the Polk County Sheriff’s Department in central Iowa. She was set to be released from an Iowa jail after serving time for a traffic violation.
When her family tried to pick her up, a jail worker stated that she was not going to be released because she had an ICE detention hold on her. Polk County Sheriff’s Department officials claimed Jacobo’s flagging was a “clerical error,” stating that officers were looking for another inmate by that name to slate for deportation.
🔗 Read more: Dozens of Native Americans report being questioned or detained by ICE (CBS News)
Peter Yazzie (Navajo): A Navajo Nation member said he was zip-tied and taken into custody during an early-morning stop in Peoria. Peter Yazzie said he was parked outside a convenience store at 4:30 a.m., about to start a day’s work, when ICE agents flooded the parking lot. Yazzie said he told agents he was Native and had documents in his car yet still ended up in a holding cell. He was detained for four hours despite having several forms of ID on him.
🔗 Watch the report: Navajo man says ICE detained him in Peoria (AZ Family)
Sophie Watso (Mdewakanton Dakota): Sophie Watso was arrested by immigration agents on Jan. 14 who accused her of obstructing an ongoing investigation. Watso was detained in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, a suburb immediately north of the city of Minneapolis. Agents broke the windows of her truck, removed her from the vehicle and detained her. She wasn’t released from ICE custody until Jan. 16, more than 48 hours after her initial encounter. Watso is now using a Native American run encampment site near the detention centre to heal and to stand against ICE.
🔗 Read more: Dakota woman recounts more than 48 hours in immigration detainment (ICT News)
The frequency of these encounters has forced tribes to take defensive measures. The Navajo Nation, for example, established a hotline to help citizens who are questioned or detained by federal immigration authorities simply because of their appearance.
Echoes Of The Past: The Concentration Camps of the Indian Wars
For Indigenous communities in the Southwest, the sight of federal agents removing Native people from their communities is a dark echo of the 19th-century Indian Wars. The modern detention centers in New Mexico share a geographic and thematic proximity to one of the most tragic episodes of Native American internment: Bosque Redondo.
In 1863, the U.S. military began a brutal campaign to forcefully remove the Navajo (Diné) and Mescalero Apache from their homelands.
Over 10,000 Navajo and 500 Mescalero Apache were forced to march hundreds of miles across New Mexico to a desolate internment camp at Fort Sumner, an event known as the Long Walk.
Bosque Redondo functioned as a concentration camp, designed to be a reservation where Native Americans would be forcibly assimilated and detained.
The interned people suffered from starvation, crop failures, disease, and highly alkaline, brackish water from the Pecos River.
During the forced marches and the subsequent four-year internment, up to 3,500 people died from exposure, malnutrition, and disease.
It was not until the Treaty of Bosque Redondo was signed in 1868 that the surviving Navajo were allowed to leave the camp and return to a fraction of their ancestral lands.
“Some anthropologists state that the ‘collective trauma of the Long Walk ... is critical to contemporary Navajos’ sense of identity as a people’.”
The duality is not stark, it is blunt and to be expected. The machines historical legacy still hums loud. The actions of today mirror the military purge of Indigenous people at Bosque Redondo was justified by the federal government under the guise of security and assimilation.
Today, the profiling, and detainment of Native Americans by federal agents are viewed by many as a continuation of a centuries-old legacy: the federal government dictating who belongs on the land, while subjecting its original inhabitants to state violence and displacement.
