Davids’ bill to stop ICE hassling Native Americans OK, but not enough | Opinion
In the 1977 movie “Fun With Dick and Jane,” as laid-off aerospace executive Dick Harper (played by actor George Segal) learns to live life as a day laborer, he’s approached by an immigration officer demanding: “OK, Pancho, let’s see your immigration card.”
He of course doesn’t have one, and the officers refuse to believe him when he tells them he’s an American. So he gets frog-marched away by an agent saying “All right, buddy, you’re going downtown.”
It was art imitating life and you’d think we’d have made some progress in the intervening 50 years or so. But in these days of immigration hysteria, life imitates 1970s art.
Case in point, last November Native American actress Elaine Miles, best known for her role as medical secretary Marilyn Whirlwind in the TV series “Northern Exposure,” was accosted by four masked immigration agents at a bus stop in Washington.
Miles is a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon. But agents dismissed her tribal identification card as “fake,” with one reportedly remarking “Anyone can make that.”
She asked them to call the tribe’s number on the card to verify her citizenship. They refused and tried to take her phone when she attempted to place the call herself. Finally, a fifth officer arrived and made the call, after which they let her go.
I bring this up now because Kansas Rep. Sharice Davids and three others have introduced federal legislation called the Respect Tribal IDs Act.
It would require the Department of Homeland Security to institute a training program for its immigration agents that would include:
— establishing consistent protocols for dealing with Native American citizens.
— a requirement to accept tribal ID as proof of citizenship.
— instruction in how to identify legitimate tribal IDs.
“Tribal sovereignty is a legal and constitutional recognition of Tribal Nations and their citizens, and the federal government has a responsibility to respect that,” Davids, a member of the Ho-Chunk tribal nation, said in a written statement announcing the legislation.
“But lately,” she continued, “we’ve seen troubling reports of Native Americans being questioned or detained because federal officers lacked the training needed to recognize tribal documentation or understand Tribal Nation citizenship. This bipartisan bill is about preventing those failures, improving training and accountability, and making sure all people are treated with the dignity and respect they deserve.”
It’s a decent bill and if I was in Congress, I’d probably vote for it.
But it’s still a Band-Aid on the gaping wound of our real problem, which is the rampant racism that fuels President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement’s approach to immigration.
The bill might make things a little easier for Native Americans, but it wouldn’t come close to stopping the random sweeps where anyone with darker skin or speaking with an accent (or heaven forbid speaking Spanish, Haitian creole or Arabic) is immediately suspect and has to fear interrogation and/or detention whenever they go shopping or take their kids to preschool.
I never ever thought I’d live in a country where the president of the United States would appoint himself as the racial-profiler in chief, but Trump did.
I never ever thought I’d live in a country where the Supreme Court of the United States would let him get away with it, but they did.
I never ever thought I’d live in a country where we would determine citizenship not by where you were born, but by the purity of your blood, which Trump has executive ordered and SCOTUS is seriously considering.
The Respect Tribal IDs Act would be a step in the right direction, but overall, it’s a small step for not that many people. As long as any American citizen can be stopped and questioned for existing while brown, we aren’t where we need to be.
We still have a very, very long way to go to reach Davids’ stated goal of “making sure all people are treated with the dignity and respect they deserve.”
