This article was first published by APTN in Canada
Gina was driving in Minneapolis when a wave of anxiety fell over her. She noticed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents following her.
“The light turns green and I jump into the left lane so that I can hurry up and take a left and get on the highway,” says Gina, who APTN News has agreed to protect her real identity for fear of being targeted at her workplace. “They did the same aggressive maneuver and got on the highway with me. So I’m like ‘okay they’re definitely following me.’”
What felt like an eternity of being followed finally came to an abrupt stop when the officers turned into another lane.
She says that as the agents passed her, she was too afraid to look at them.
“But in my peripheral I could very clearly tell it was ICE folks, just based on the camel [uniform style] that they had. As a born and raised South Sider with American citizen status and Native American, I shouldn’t feel fear in my own state,” she said.
Gina is Red Lake Ojibwe and Oneida.
Native Americans across the United States have been getting arrested and detained by ICE.
“When does it stop being necessary to live in fight-or-flight mode?” she says. “Have not Native Americans been through enough already on this continent?”
On the other side of the Medicine Line, Indigenous people also know the feeling of being targeted by federal agents. Specifically, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
“The police would just terrorise and come in at all hours of the night, two o’clock in the morning, drag everybody out of bed, shining lights, hiding in the bushes, just really trying to enforce the fact that they were there and that they had full control over our lives,” says Sleydo’ Molly Wickham.
Wickham is a wing chief of Cas Yikh, a house group of the Gidimt’en Clan of the Wet’suwet’en Nation in British Columbia. She was targeted for blocking work on the Coastal GasLink pipeline on Wet’suwet’en territory.
“Most of the people that have lived through this experience on the Yintah have experienced extreme PTSD,” she says.
Some of Wickham’s experiences sound similar to those in Minneapolis. Including the experiences of Dakota woman Sophie Watso. Watso was taken from her car, arrested by ICE agents and put in the Whipple immigration detention centre.
“I was surrounded by three ICE vehicles,” says Watso. “They ripped me from my vehicle, put me on top of the glass that they just broke, and they ripped my dog from my arms and put me in a vehicle by my neck.”
Wickham saw a similar experience happen to her sister.
“One of my little sisters was followed up to my home where she was living and pulled out of a vehicle that she was in, in my driveway by the RCMP and pepper sprayed and arrested,” says Wickham.
Wickham sees a connection between ICE and the RCMP.
“It’s just one piece of the bigger picture of how the state is instilling fear and trying to maintain control over its people,” she says. “This is something that isn’t going to go away and that is actually just going to intensify in different ways. And it’s meant to control the narrative, control people’s minds, instill fear so that we don’t rise up and fight back.”
Despite Gina coming out of her experience without having to directly interact with ICE, the fear still lives with her.
“You can wave your passport in their face, and it doesn’t mean anything. If they want to, or they find, you know, some bullshit reason to, they’ll still throw you in the back of their car, and detain you, and hide you in the Whipple building, and do who knows what to you,” she says. “Until they decide to release you in the middle of the night with what you had on you—out into the cold.”
By Savanna Craig of APTN
