During the week of Monday, Jan. 20, fear spread rapidly across New Mexico and Arizona, spurred by reports alleging that agents from U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are interrogating and detaining tribal members. 

On Wednesday the 22nd, tribal citizens began contacting tribal and state officials to inform them of encounters with ICE. Some were reporting rumors they’d read or heard; others said their family members or they themselves had been detained or questioned.

Then, in public meetings and statements issued on Thursday, various officials discussed these reports. Mescalero Apache Tribe President Thora Walsh-Padilla said in a statement that she’d received multiple calls involving rumors about ICE and tribal members. Her office was able to verify one incident: in a public place in the village of Ruidoso, New Mexico, on Jan. 22, an ICE agent tried to talk to a Mescalero Apache citizen in Spanish. The agent asked to see a passport. The tribal member, whose name has not been revealed, responded in English and showed a tribal identification card and a picture of a driver’s license, at which point the agent left.

At a Thursday meeting of the Navajo Nation Council, Arizona state senator Theresa Hatathlie spoke in Diné about a workplace raid in which a number of Indigenous citizens were made to stand against vehicles and questioned — though she didn’t specify whether the people who detained them were ICE agents, according to Diné translator Dr. Dolly Manson. The senator said she did not want to reveal the tribal members’ place of work, to protect them from retaliation. One person kept trying to explain to the officers that she was a Navajo citizen, but they didn’t know what “Navajo” meant, Senator Hatathlie said. Hatathlie later reported to CNN that the incident occurred in Scottsdale, Arizona, that the officers interrogating people were ICE agents and that the questioning lasted for two hours. 

A Thursday press release from the Navajo Nation Council stated that ICE agents have questioned or detained several tribal members, even though they possessed multiple forms of identification. The Council has not shared further details about the detention. 

And Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren wrote in a Thursday statement that “recent reports have raised concerns about potential U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity, prompting anxiety and hysteria among community members.” On both Thursday and Friday, he noted that his office has not been able to confirm any of these accounts.

The rush of information caused a stir in newsrooms. Journalists quickly picked up the statements, and on Thursday and Friday several newspapers and websites, including The Santa Fe New Mexican, Source NM, The Arizona Mirror and The Arizona Republic, published stories about the encounters and the official responses. The articles noted that tribal officials were directing tribal citizens to carry proof of citizenship with them at all times.

“Rumors about potential immigration raids threw Santa Fe (and the newsroom) into chaos Wednesday, but law enforcement and government officials have been unable to confirm any activity so far,” Santa Fe New Mexican reporter Carina Julig wrote on X. She later reposted the message, adding, “More immigration enforcement worries, this time from Native New Mexicans.”

“Are they going to come door to door?”

The articles and the officials’ statements went viral across social media, with many people expressing worry and anger about the events. Some simply echoed the information in the statements and coverage, spreading word that ICE was harassing and detaining tribal citizens, while others predicted that Native Americans were going to start getting deported.

“Excuse me? Native Americans are considered non-citizens now and are going to be deported? Where to? The United States?” wrote a Facebook poster on Saturday, re-posting The Arizona Mirror article.

Underlying the discussion on social media is anxiety that President Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportation of migrants could include members of tribal nations who are U.S. citizens. On Sunday, in a Facebook group called “Friends Who Like Occupy Democrats,” someone posted a bright red banner that reads: “Trump wants to deport all Native Americans to Mexico.”

This concern is compounded by memories of the U.S. government forcibly displacing Indigenous Americans from their homelands throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

“It’s getting around to the point where people are worried,” Gabe Howard, a Navajo citizen from Fort Defiance, Arizona, told Searchlight New Mexico on Saturday. “Are they going to drag us out of our houses? Are they going to come door to door?”

This is a fast-moving situation involving a great deal of uncertainty. ICE has not responded to a request from Searchlight for more information. At press time — based on what Searchlight has been able to gauge by phone calls to officials and business owners, interviews with Navajo citizens and review of press releases and articles — the scattered detainments of tribal citizens do not appear to be part of a larger, systematic plan to deport Indigenous Americans. But without more information, it’s difficult to judge the scale of what’s happening. In an article published on Monday, Jan. 27, Navajo Nation officials told CNN that at least fifteen tribal citizens have reported being detained or questioned by ICE agents in their homes or workplaces. The officials didn’t offer names or details about what happened to these people.

Birthright citizenship

Some of the fear about what ICE may be up to comes from a Justice Department brief filed on Jan. 22, in which attorneys call into question Native birthright citizenship.

On Trump’s first day in office, he issued an executive order in which he declared that he was ending birthright citizenship for the children of people who are in the U.S. on temporary visas or who lack documentation. A group of state attorneys general challenged the order in federal court in Seattle. In response, Justice Department attorneys filed a brief arguing that citizenship should be based on a nineteenth century understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment. 

The Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The Justice Department pointed to an 1884 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Elk v. Wilkins, which said that Indigenous Americans are not constitutionally entitled to birthright citizenship. “In Elk, the Court held that, because members of Indian tribes owe ‘immediate allegiance’ to their tribes, they are not ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are not constitutionally entitled to Citizenship,” the attorneys wrote.

They went on to argue that if Native Americans are not constitutionally entitled to birthright citizenship, the children of people without documentation, or on temporary visas, are “certainly” not entitled to it.

On the legal blog Turtle Talk, University of Michigan Professor and tribal appellate judge Matthew L.M. Fletcher has discussed numerous problems with this argument. Fletcher writes that Elk is “dead letter,” because in 1924 Congress enacted the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, which established that all Indigenous people born in the U.S. are citizens.

“Another reason Elk should be put to bed as irrelevant is that it makes a presumption that is simply no longer true — that Indian people are born to tribal membership,” Fletcher wrote. He pointed out that Native people are not automatically born into tribal membership and must apply for enrollment within their tribes.

“Another good reason to be done with Elk,” Fletcher wrote, “is that it is a product of a time when the Supreme Court still held as a matter of law that Indian people were subhumans incapable of citizenship.” 

He cited a passage in Elk that implies that Native Americans are uncivilized. “The obvious conclusion here,” he wrote, “is that DOJ is equating foreign-born children in the United States to a class of persons that never existed, subhuman Indigenous people so uncivilized as to be incapable of citizenship.”

Some worry that the ICE interrogations and detentions are connected to this filing.

“I don’t think anybody would have ever thought that we would be where we are today,” Eugenia Charles-Newton, Navajo Nation Council Delegate, said at the Thursday Navajo Nation Council meeting. “We have, right now, somebody who is in the highest office who is questioning the citizenship of all of our people, all of our Navajo people, all Native Americans, American Indians, and then going and doing these sweeps.”

Racial profiling

At least a few of the interrogations and detentions seem to be the result of ICE racially profiling people with brown skin. During the incident in Ruidoso, the ICE agent attempted to speak to a Mescalero Apache Citizen in Spanish. And during the incident in Arizona, ICE agents didn’t know what “Navajo” meant.

This kind of profiling has been going on for decades. Amos Johnson, a Navajo citizen from Black Mesa on the Navajo Nation, told Searchlight that he lived in Las Cruces in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, and that people he encountered often assumed he was Mexican. In 1992, when he was returning to the U.S. from a trip to Canada, border patrol agents detained him and asked to see a green card.

“There should be some sort of education provided, some sort of awareness that they need to go through, so they don’t just start rounding up people,” he said.

The recent reports about searches have led tribal officials to urge Native people to be prepared if they’re stopped and questioned. One resource: a new crisis hotline established through the nonprofit organization Operation Rainbow Bridge. The office of Navajo Nation President Nygren is directing tribal citizens to carry a state-issued identification card and to comply with law enforcement officers if they’re asked for identification. “Law enforcement officials may hold you until your citizenship status is determined,” the office warns.

Other forms of identification — such as a tribal identification card or a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood (CIB), a document issued by the federal government recognizing tribal membership based on an individual’s lineage — may help to prove citizenship, too. But officials have expressed uncertainty as to whether ICE agents will treat these documents as valid.

People may also have trouble accessing these forms of identification. Only 8,000 Navajo Nation tribal identification cards have been issued since 2012, though there are 400,000 enrolled tribal members, according to reporter Arlyssa D. Becenti of The Arizona Republic.

New Mexico state senator Shannon Pinto (D-Tohatchi), a Diné citizen who represents part of the Navajo Nation in the state legislature, told Searchlight over the weekend that she’d received many messages from constituents who are frightened, in part because accessing the proper documents to prove U.S. citizenship can be challenging and confusing for Navajo tribal members. She knows of many Native people who don’t have CIBs, and she has observed uncertainty as to whether and when documentation needs to be renewed.

“The process is time-consuming,” she said. “A lot of people don’t have that kind of time to take off from work.” Many people also don’t have access to working phones, she said, and those who do are having trouble reaching tribal officials to report incidents and ask for help with identification.

“We’re treated like we’re not from here”

A cold, dusty wind rushed through the stalls of the Gallup Flea Market in the early afternoon on Saturday, Jan. 25. Vendors struggled against it to pack up their goods, folding tarps and gathering necklaces. The market was technically open for a few more hours, but only a couple of shoppers wandered around the booths. By 3 p.m. the parking lot was empty. Some blamed the wind and the cold. Others said people were scared off by the prospect that ICE agents might appear.

Almost everyone said they’d heard rumors on social media about ICE. No one had seen the agents themselves. One woman looked at a Facebook post written by a Navajo citizen in Arizona, who said that ICE conducted a sweep at her workplace and almost deported her. According to the post, she showed the agents her CIB and they left her alone.

Some said they weren’t worried — not because they didn’t think ICE would come, but because they had their tribal IDs and driver’s licenses at the ready. A 76-year-old woman asked whether her driver’s license would suffice as proof of her citizenship, adding that she’s scared.

“We’re from this continent,” a Diné citizen named Daniel Tullie told Searchlight, referring to Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. “But we’re treated like we’re not from here.” Tullie drives hundreds of miles across the Navajo Nation each week, running a coffee business while attending school at Arizona State University. He travels with his operating equipment and is worried that ICE agents could stop him on the road and pull out all his gear. “Just growing up brown, there’s always been an awareness that white supremacy is a thing,” he said. “It’s elevated now.”

One woman asked how many days Trump had been in office, and then said, “Gas is still up. Groceries are still expensive.” A man selling kneel down bread — a traditional bread of corn, wrapped in a cornhusk — said, “It feels like it’s been a month. It hasn’t even been a week.”

He said that the fear people are experiencing stems from historical trauma and mentioned the Long Walk in the 1860s, when the U.S. government forced Diné people to march hundreds of miles from their homelands to an internment camp in eastern New Mexico. 

“I think a lot of people feel that their safety is at risk today,” he said. “The best thing we can do is educate ourselves. We have to be alert and really stay aware of our surroundings.”

Correction: In an earlier version of this article, the reporter misgendered one of the people questioned by ICE. The article has been updated to reflect the individual’s gender.