'A deep irony': Native American legal expert weighs in on racial profiling
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Nikki Love, the executive director of the Tiwahe Foundation, lifted her sleeve just before a press conference on Friday to reveal a phone number written on her hand. The phone number was given out by an attorney with Native American Rights Fund — a national nonprofit legal organization headquartered in Boulder, Colo.
Love said she and others were advised by NARF they could call the number should they be stopped or detained by federal immigration authorities on the ground in Minneapolis.
Love shared those legal resources with the small crowd that gathered at 14th Avenue and Franklin Avenue to learn more about how Native American civic and grassroots leaders would respond to the increased presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in and around south Minneapolis.
Since the recent surge in ICE operations in Minnesota, several more Native Americans living in the Twin Cities have documented stops by ICE agents in which they say they were racially profiled.
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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.
“Justice Kavanaugh's invocation of race is that Native Americans are being confused for other minority groups, some of whom may not have citizenship,” De León said.
In September, the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a temporary restraining order issued by a lower court in California that had barred federal immigration agents from considering physical appearance, language use, and other factors when conducting immigration stops.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo that “ethnicity” could be a “relevant factor” in federal agents’ decision to stop and demand proof of citizenship when conducting stops.
Legal observers have also noted that Kavanaugh walked back that opinion in the footnote to separate, unreleased court cases this December — leaving room for confusion.
Thursday, Shawntia Sosa-Clara, a descendant of Red Lake Nation, captured several minutes of video on her phone of her 20-year-old nephew, Jose Roberto Ramirez, also a Red Lake Nation descendant, violently pulled out of his car by federal ICE agents last Thursday.
In a brief interview with MPR News, Sosa-Clara said that her nephew, a U.S. citizen born in Minnesota, had been racially profiled. In the video, Sosa-Clara and Ramirez identify themselves as U.S. citizens. Unable to provide an ID at the time of the stop, Ramirez was pulled from the car.
Sosa-Clara said ICE scanned her nephew’s face with a cell phone app during the stop. She said her nephew was released approximately six hours later, and that data gathered by the facial recognition software used by ICE during the stop confirmed his U.S. citizenship
MPR News has reached out to ICE officials requesting comment regarding Ramirez’s stop and has not received a response.
The type of stop documented by Sosa-Clara has come to be dubbed a “Kavanaugh stop,” a name given to those actions Kavanaugh described in his concurrence as “brief” stops that allow immigration agents to ask an individual for identification.
De León said the profiling of U.S. citizens from minority communities, including Native Americans is one of the outcomes of a Kavanaugh’s earlier opinion.
“Native Americans are unquestionably United States citizens. And we do recognize that there's a deep irony that the first people on this land who are unquestionably United States citizens are being questioned over their citizenship based on race,” De León said.
Friday evening, NARF posted legal resources for Native Americans who may encounter ICE advising of them of their rights.
Since Friday, multiple tribal nations with citizens living in Minnesota have posted notices advising their members and descendants to carry identification.
Several of the tribal satellite offices in Minneapolis have posted dates and times in Minneapolis to provide those ID cards.
