“Where would I be deported to? Because I’m a U.S. citizen, and this is all I’ve known.”

That’s Leticia Jacobo, Salt River Pima-Maricopa. Booked into Polk County Jail in Des Moines for a suspended license. Scheduled for release November 11, 2025. Held longer because jail staff flagged her with an ICE detainer. Her sister asked what everyone should have asked: how do you deport someone whose nation predates yours by millennia?

Here’s the verse they teach: 575 federally recognized tribal nations. Government-to-government relationship. Federal trust responsibility. Sovereign governments with sovereign citizens. This is settled law. Has been since 1924, when the Indian Citizenship Act finally extended birthright citizenship to the people who were born here before “here” had a name.

Here are the verses they don’t sing.

January 2026, Peoria, Arizona. Peter Yazzie, Navajo, is at a gas station. ICE agents pull him from his car and zip-tie him. His birth certificate, driver’s license, and Certificate of Indian Blood are in the vehicle. He is zip-tied before anyone checks.

January 2026, suburban Minneapolis. Jose Roberto Ramirez, Red Lake Nation, twenty years old. ICE agents draw guns and drag him from his vehicle. He has his birth certificate and U.S. passport. An agent tells him “he wasn’t from here.”

Redmond, Washington. Elaine Miles, actress, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Four ICE agents detain her walking to a bus stop. She presents her federally recognized tribal ID. One agent says it looks “fake.” Another says “Anyone can make that.”

Her son and uncle had already been detained. Same ID. Same refusal.

The National Congress of American Indians passed two emergency resolutions after tribal citizens reported being detained in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Chicago, and Minneapolis. In some encounters, officers covered their faces and refused to identify themselves. In others, they held tribal citizens until they could produce non-tribal government ID. The tribal ID — issued by a sovereign government the United States has treaty obligations with — was not enough.

Here is the paradox that makes the whole thing structural:

TSA accepts tribal IDs at airports. The State Department accepts them for passport applications. Employers accept them on Form I-9 for employment verification. The federal government recognizes these documents in every context except the one where agents are pointing guns at people.

On February 12, 2026, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem sent a letter to tribal leaders stating that ICE “does not target and will not target Native Americans.” In the same letter, she expressed disappointment that some tribal councils voted to ban ICE from their reservations. She accused them of spreading misinformation about tribal member detentions. This letter was sent one month after Peter Yazzie was zip-tied at a gas station.

Now the legislative response. The Respect Tribal IDs Act, introduced by Representatives Sharice Davids, Don Bacon, Teresa Leger Fernandez, and Senator Ben Ray Lujan. Bipartisan. The bill would require DHS to develop standardized training so ICE agents can recognize tribal identification documents as valid proof of citizenship. Annual training. Region-specific reference materials. Coordination with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and tribal nations.

Read that again. A bill to train federal employees to recognize the governments that were here first.

Sharice Davids is Ho-Chunk Nation. An enrolled tribal member had to write legislation to teach federal agents that her own ID is real.

Meanwhile, tribal members are scrambling to get new identification. Arizona now offers an optional “Native American” designation on driver’s licenses. The DMV is processing 1,650 requests per month. Some tribal members have waited five years for their tribal IDs to arrive. They are applying for state documents to prove what their nations already certified — because the federal government trusts a state DMV more than a sovereign nation.

And underneath all of this, the floor is moving. In Trump v. Barbara, the administration is arguing before the Supreme Court that citizenship should be domicile-based, not birthright. If that theory prevails, Native American citizenship becomes a privilege granted by the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 — a statute Congress could theoretically revise — rather than a constitutional right under the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Gorsuch asked the Solicitor General directly whether Native Americans retain constitutional birthright citizenship. The response, according to Brookings, “offered no reassurance.”

That’s the architecture. Not a policy failure. Not a training gap. A structure in which the first people on this continent hold citizenship that is, legally, one Supreme Court decision away from being reclassified as a federal favor.

Gabriel Galanda, Seattle-based Indigenous rights attorney, named it plainly: “What we’re talking about here is racial profiling.”

The Respect Tribal IDs Act is a reasonable bill. It might even pass. But the fact that it needs to exist is the verse they don’t sing. The song is called “This Land Is Your Land.” The people whose land it was are standing at a gas station in Peoria, zip-tied, waiting for someone to read their ID.

// NEON BLOOD

Sources: ICT News, Native News Online, Brookings Institution, Native News Online (Noem letter), Native News Online (NCAI resolutions), KJZZ.