Thousands to march to honor missing and murdered Indigenous people
MINNEAPOLIS — Thousands of people are expected to march Friday in Minneapolis to honor missing and murdered Indigenous people.
The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives March will start at the Minneapolis American Indian Center at 11 a.m., with speakers from the community. People will then march to ensure the memory of the missing women, girls, men, boys, two-spirit and LGBTQI+ relatives is kept alive.
Indigenous women account for less than 1% of Minnesota's population but make up about 10% of missing women in the state. Indigenous men are also overrepresented, state officials say.
"We use this day as a time to increase visibility of this issue, call on legislators and policy makers to be accountable to our communities, and to honor our families and relatives who have been impacted," said Minnesota Indian Women's Sexual Assault Coalition Executive Director Nicole Matthews. "I look forward to the day when we no longer need rallies like this, because we will have ended this violence against our people. But until then....we will take up space in the streets and continue to call for action."
Last year, 716 Indigenous people went missing in Minnesota; 57% were women.
In 2021, Gov. Tim Walz signed legislation that created the country's first Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Office.
In 2024, the office provided services to 28 families and consulted on 10 additional cases. Four cases were closed when a victim was found safe or was located, officials say.
To help raise awareness about missing Indigenous relatives, Minnesotans can purchase a MMIR license plate, which supports the Gaagige-Mikwendaagoziwag Reward Account, that considers rewards for tips that lead to a resolution of a missing or murdered Indigenous relative's case.
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Hamilton Spectator
an hour ago
- Hamilton Spectator
First Nations leaders provide national response to King's Speech
(ANNews) – First Nations leaders from across Canada gathered in Ottawa to provide a unified response to the May 27 Speech from the Throne delivered by King Charles III, with a statement from some of the leaders highlighting the 'profound gap between ceremonial gestures and the reality of unfulfilled Treaty obligations.' Prime Minister Mark Carney asked the King to deliver this year's Speech from the Throne, normally delivered by the governor general as the King's representative in Canada, as a symbol of Canada's independence from the United States. A small group of First Nations leaders were invited to the Senate for the King's speech as dignitaries, including Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC) Grand Chief Kyra Wilson. In a joint news release from the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), Confederation of Treaty 6 First Nations, Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN), Southern Chiefs' Organization (SCO) and AMC, Wilson said she finds it 'concerning that not all First Nations leadership were present or included in this historical moment.' Grand Chief Wilson struck a more optimistic tone at an Ottawa news conference responding to the Speech from the Throne, noting that it's a positive development that the King mentioned Indigenous rights and reconciliation in his speech. 'That makes me hopeful [for] the renewed relationship that we can have as First Nations people with the Crown,' she said. 'Going forward, my hope is that Canada can respect our Treaties, respect who we are as First Nations people and work together, because we are not going away.' FSIN Vice Chief David Pratt of Muscowpetung First Nation, located 65 km northwest of Regina, called on Carney 'to meaningfully engage our chiefs.' 'Don't just placate us with nice words. That day and age is over,' said Vice Chief Pratt. 'Don't come and try to take resources out of our backyards without sitting first with our Elders and treating us with the respect that we deserve.' Carney has come under criticism from First Nations leaders , as well as labour, climate and faith groups, for legislation enabling projects deemed to be in the 'national interest' to receive approval before moving through regulatory and consultation processes. In the Throne Speech, which is written by the government but delivered by the Crown, King Charles said the government wants to reduce the average timeline for approving major projects to two years from five. Pratt called it 'a shame' that not a single Cabinet minister or representative of the Crown attended the First Nations' pipe ceremony on Parliament Hill. He added that it would be a meaningful gesture for the King to return to Canada to visit Treaty First Nations, with the 150th anniversary of Treaty 5 coming up in the fall and Treaty 6 occurring next year. Confederacy of Treaty 6 First Nations Grand Chief Greg Desjarlais, who also serves as the chief of Frog Lake First Nation in eastern Alberta, said he was 'very disappointed' that the King spoke of reconciliation without any mention of the Treaties. 'I'm grateful to be here to share some words, to encourage each and every one of you, the chiefs, to keep pushing, for the people to get behind the chiefs, the leadership, and not to fight,' said Desjarlais. Chief Derek Nepinak of the Minegoziibe Anishinabe, located on the western shore of Lake Winnipegosis in Manitoba, was another chief invited to the Senate to hear the Speech from the Throne. He told First Nations people to 'get ready' for the government fast-tracking resource projects. 'This is the time for us to be prepared for what's next. Some of you can participate, some of us won't, but let's protect the water first,' said Chief Nepinak. 'That's the most important thing we have.' Chief Kelsey Jacko of Cold Lake First Nations in Treaty 6 said he was one of the First Nations leaders who 'travelled across Turtle Island hoping to speak to the King of the nation we entered into Treaty with.' 'I know he is busy, but imagine if you haven't seen your business partner in 150 years,' said Jacko. He called on King Charles to collaborate with Prime Minister Carney to establish a Royal Commission on Treaty in the 21st Century to uphold and affirm Treaty rights in the face of changing biodiversity and growing loss of water. Grand Chief Trevor Mercredi of Treaty 8 First Nations in Alberta, in which the oil sands are located, noted the amount of 'resource revenue … coming from our lands each and every day while our people are suffering.' 'Our people come here in duress today. We don't come here with peace on our minds,' said Mercredi, the former chief of Beaver First Nation. He added that it was 'unacceptable' that most Treaty First Nations leaders were forced to stand 'outside here on the sidewalks' while King Charles spoke in the Senate. When the King spoke of 'barriers and red tape removal, he's talking about us,' said Mercredi. National Dene Chief George Mackenzie, who represents five First Nations in the Northwest Territories, contrasted the 'modern infrastructure' in downtown Ottawa with the 'broken windows' and poverty on First Nations reserves. 'Our young people should be strong in their culture, language, can survive on the land and be proud of it, [and] at the same time, be the best they can be in education,' said Chief Mackenzie. 'We need to be given that opportunity.' Chief Billy-Joe Tuccaro of Mikisew Cree First Nation in Treaty 8 noted that there are few things all Treaty First Nations leaders can agree on. 'Among the chiefs, we all have different agendas, but one thing we have in common is the Treaty, and we must fight for that for the future generations to come,' he said. He said the government's promise to reduce project approval timelines by 60 per cent is 'very alarming' for members of his community, given the impact of tar sands mining on their health. Addressing the federal government, Dene Tha' First Nation Chief Wilfred Hooka-Nooza emphasized the 'shared journey' of reconciliation. 'It requires more than promises. It requires action. It requires you to listen to our stories, understand our struggles and work with us to address the wrongs of the past and present,' he said. 'It requires you to honour the Treaties, not as historical documents but as living agreements that are vital to our collective future.' To his fellow First Nations leaders, Hooka-Nooza offered a message of hope, 'for it is hope that sustains us and guides us towards the future generation.' Error! 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Atlantic
2 hours ago
- Atlantic
Birthright Citizenship Is a New World Ideal
The United States, Donald Trump says, 'is the only country in the world' that grants citizenship to babies born within its borders. He's wrong, of course. Tanzania, Pakistan, and France all grant some form of birthright citizenship. But birthright citizenship is ultimately an American ideal. That is, all of the Americas. Nearly every country in the Western Hemisphere grants citizenship to children born in its territory irrespective of the nationality of their parents. It's part of the promise of the New World, that the Western Hemisphere would be, as the American revolutionary Thomas Paine said of the United States, an 'asylum' for humanity. 'Open,' echoed George Washington, 'to receive not only the opulent & respectable' but the 'oppressed & Persecuted of all nations.' The children of those oppressed and persecuted would be citizens by right. The legal term for birthright citizenship is jus solis, or 'by right of soil'—in contrast to jus sanguinis, which assigns citizenship to children based on the national identity of one or both of their parents, an identity that could be defined by bloodline, race, or religion. Mexicans were the first to write jus solis into a constitution, in 1814, during their war of independence against Spain. In bright, unambiguous language, the rebels stated that 'all those born in La Mexica América are considered citizens.' By 'all,' they meant all. Having declared the abolition of both chattel slavery and Indigenous tribute and servitude, Mexican revolutionaries intended to make everyone, regardless of skin color, a member of the nation, but Spanish troops retook Mexico before this constitution could go fully into effect. The three-century-old Spanish empire was obsessed with blood—how it conveyed lineage and, in the Spanish view, confirmed virtue. Jus sanguinis had been the law of the land, and a good part of the empire's massive bureaucracy worked to keep track of ancestry, issuing certificates of purity certifying that no taint of Jewish, Muslim, Native American, or African blood flowed in the bearer's veins. Mexico was just one front in a hemisphere-wide war against Spanish rule, which began in 1810 and didn't end until 1826, when revolutionaries overran royalism's last bastion, the Pacific port city of Callao, Peru. With all of Spanish America (save Cuba and Puerto Rico) now free, the region's republican leaders were eager to leave Spain's blood medievalism behind, to create a modern legal system for the Americas. The foundation of that system was jus solis. In a revolutionary act of inclusion, the new nations of Spanish America adopted it universally, to apply to every free resident within a given national territory. In Spanish America, as in the United States, the politics of jus solis was tied to the politics of race and slavery. The historians Martha S. Jones and Kate Masur recently submitted an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court to counter the Trump administration's efforts to abolish or curtail birthright citizenship. They note that free people of color—decades before the Civil War and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868—regularly invoked a common-law version of jus solis: They were citizens of the United States because they'd been born in the United States. In 1848, African American activists in Pennsylvania published a pamphlet demanding constitutional protection, insisting that their 'certificates of Birth and Nativity' provide all the 'evidence' needed to confirm their citizenship. The nation's courts and laws, however, ensured that, in the United States, the bestowal of citizenship at birth remained predominantly a right enjoyed by white people. David W. Blight: Birthright citizenship is a sacred guarantee Spanish Americans applied jus solis more generously. In many of the region's new republics, to be born a citizen meant to be born free, as independence leaders moved quickly to repeal a doctrine— partus sequitur ventrem, Latin for 'the child follows the womb'—that defined children born to enslaved mothers as also enslaved. Widely applied during Spanish rule, the doctrine was still the law of the land in U.S. slave states when Chilean insurgents declared their independence in 1810 and passed, a year later, the world's first 'free womb' law. The idea of childbirth as an emancipatory act was Spanish America's unique contribution to the transatlantic antislavery movement. Argentina followed with a similar law in 1813, then Colombia in 1814, Venezuela and Peru in 1821, and Ecuador and Uruguay in 1825. Different nations ended slavery at different times, depending on local politics. Many countries—Chile and Mexico, for instance—did so soon after their break with Spain. Others, including Argentina, took longer. But with independence, the end of human bondage in Spanish America was clearly in sight. 'No one is born a slave,' Mexican abolitionists said. They are born citizens. Racism of course continued throughout the now-free Spanish America, as did a status and class hierarchy organized around racial identity. It was easier to defeat Spain's army than to dismantle the social structure its empire left behind. And jus solis had a dark side. Politicians used generous citizenship and naturalization laws to encourage European migration and campaign to 'whiten' the nation. Still, compared with the expansion of chattel slavery and hardening of racial apartheid then taking place in the United States, Spanish America was exceptional. Its founders were creating something entirely new in the world: a community of sovereign nation-states composed, at least legally, of equal, racially diverse citizens. James Madison noticed. The former president knew that his country couldn't go on subjugating people of color forever, be they, as he put it, 'the black race within our bosom' or the 'red on our border.' Writing in 1826, Madison thought it worth studying how 'the regions South of us,' especially Mexico and Peru, were incorporating emancipated slaves and Indigenous peoples into their newly constituted nations. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina thought otherwise. Spanish America's 'fatal error' was 'placing the colored race on an equality with the white.' 'Ours is the Government of the white man,' he said in 1848, and it needed to remain so. Denying birthright citizenship to people of color was necessary to that vision. The United States eventually caught up with Latin America. In 1865, the Union Army defeated the Confederacy with the help of about 180,000 Black soldiers. Their rights could no longer be denied. The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified three years later, finally granted citizenship to free people of African descent: '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 middle clause of that sentence—'and subject to jurisdiction thereof'—is U.S. birthright citizenship's potential Achilles heel. It shouldn't be, because congressional debates from that time make clear what the drafters meant by that phrase. As the historian Eric Foner writes, Congress intended that clause to exclude not migrants but specifically Native Americans, who, the argument went, were ineligible for U.S. citizenship because of their subordination to tribal jurisdiction. (Congress would grant them citizenship in 1924.) Also excluded were foreign diplomats and soldiers, who were protected by their home country's jurisdictional immunity. (Most Spanish American nations likewise exempted foreign envoys from their jus solis clause, though none excluded Native Americans.) Migrants began arriving in the United States in massive numbers toward the end of the Civil War—mostly from Europe but also from Spanish America, the Caribbean, and Asia. Most came undocumented, without visas, passports, or formal permission to enter the country. Mexicans crossed the border at will, to work and to live. If the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment wanted to exclude the children of these people from the benefit of birthright citizenship, they would have said so. But as Congress moved toward ratifying the amendment, whenever a nativist legislator proposed excluding this or that pariah people—the Chinese, say, or the Romani—from birthright citizenship, their colleagues pushed back with the broadest interpretation possible of jus soli, generous enough to cover, said California Senator John Conness, even 'the children born here of Mongolian parents.' There is no doubt that the amendment's authors understood that the offspring of foreign migrants in the United States were subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. But starting in the 1990s, activists and politicians seeking to restrict U.S. immigration policy interpreted the clause to apply to undocumented migrants. The first to formally do so was Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, a Democrat, who in 1993 introduced the Immigration Stabilization Act, arguing that a baby born to an undocumented mother who was a citizen of another country was, by definition, subject to that country's jurisdiction, not the United States'. Reid's proposal ignored the legal status of fathers and focused exclusively on the nationality of birth mothers, a curious resurrection of partus sequitur ventrem: The child follows the womb and is condemned to return to the country the mother fled. Reid's bill died in committee (and Reid later regretted his proposal, calling it the 'biggest mistake' he'd ever made). But it foreshadowed bad things to come. The Trump administration today is similarly asking the Supreme Court to interpret the clause to mean that children born of foreign nationals are not 'subject to the jurisdiction' of the United States, and therefore not eligible for citizenship. Most of Latin America holds fast to birthright citizenship today. 'All people born in Mexican territory,' Mexico's constitution states, 'regardless of their parent's nationality,' are Mexican, an identity that can 'never be revoked.' Colombia is one of the few nations that restricts jus solis, requiring at least one parent to be a nationalized Colombian. But with Venezuelans pouring into Colombia, fleeing their country's worsening situation, Bogotá—fearing the creation of a large class of gente apátrida ('stateless people') — has waived restrictions on jus solis. While the Trump administration seems to be set on making life miserable for Venezuelan refugees, Colombia has issued an estimated 27,000 birth certificates to babies born of Venezuelans in its territory. Chile likewise liberalized its jus solis requirements to support the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Haitian refugees, allowing many of their children to become Chilean citizens. The one woeful exception to the rule is the Dominican Republic. For decades, courts interpreted the constitution's exemption of people 'in transit' from jus solis as pertaining to diplomats. Then, in 2013, the country's Constitutional Court, stocked with right-wing nationalists and inflamed by rising anti-Haitian racism (the Dominican Republic shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti), ruled that 'in transit' applied, retroactively to 1929, to Haitian migrant sugar-field workers. Overnight, 200,000 individuals born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents were stripped of their citizenship. At least 80,000 people were deported into Haiti; most of them had lived their whole lives in the Dominican Republic, and few spoke French or Creole. These deportees were born poor, in rural communities, in many cases at home, and have no official documentation whatsoever to mark their existence. If the United States follows the Dominican Republic and limits or does away with birthright citizenship, the result will likely be the kind of chaos seen in the Dominican Republic on an even greater scale. Trump's executive order is aimed at exempting from citizenship not just the children of undocumented parents but also the newborns of those in the United States legally, on work or student visas or awaiting their asylum hearings. The enforcement of such a restriction would require the re-creation of something like the blood-obsessed Spanish colonial bureaucracy, with officials demanding to see not just an individual's birth certificate to prove citizenship but at least one of their parent's birth certificates. The United States already has an underclass of millions of stateless workers. If their children and grandchildren were to be denied citizenship, that class would grow exponentially. Apart from the Dominican Republic, the nativist right in Latin America hasn't launched the kind of full-on assault on birthright citizenship we see in the United States. But the slurs niño ancla and bebê âncora —'anchor baby'—have entered the Spanish and Portuguese languages, mostly through social media, as far-right figures, including Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and José Antonio Kast in Chile, whip up anger against refugees. Kast's anti-migrant party, Partido Republicano, is rising in the polls ahead of next year's presidential election, promising to tighten immigration laws and generally menacing Haitian migrants. In Argentina, Javier Milei has called for an end to the country's historic liberal immigration policies, in order to, he said, 'make Argentina great again.' The first batch of jus solis constitutions in Spanish America were drafted following a bloody, two-decade-long independence war, with fighting sprawling across the continent, scattering millions far from home. The men who led those wars were idealistic, but they also had pragmatic motives for embracing birthright citizenship: It was a way of re-rooting people, of settling a hemisphere in tumult.
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
At a troubled fashion company, workers found community. Then ICE came
Saraí Ortiz's father Jose worked 18 years for Ambiance Apparel, rising to become a floor manager at the sprawling fast-fashion warehouse in downtown Los Angeles. His tenure ended Friday, when federal authorities raided the company, arresting Jose Ortiz and more than 40 other immigrant workers as Saraí watched. "You know this is a possibility all your life, but then when it happens, it plays out differently than what you think," she said Monday, standing in front of the wrought iron fencing of Ambiance's parking lot. Ambiance was one of four businesses raided by ICE on Friday, igniting a weekend of civil unrest that has led to the controversial deployment of the National Guard and active-duty Marines in Los Angeles. It was also the site of the arrest of labor leader David Huerta, who was released Monday on a $50,000 bond. Ortiz was joined at a protest Monday by other families of those detained, making a public plea for help and due process. Many of the wives and children of those taken by ICE — all men — have had little or no contact with their loved ones. Even lawyers have been denied access, they said. Read more: Union leader David Huerta released from custody Many are also from the Indigenous communities in the central Mexican region of Zacatecas. They have formed tight bonds as they started new lives in Los Angeles, including helping others to find jobs at Ambiance, a company that has a history of run-ins with federal law enforcement, but also one that provided steady work for immigrants, including Ortiz. "Ambiance complies with the law when it hires employees and it has always only hired people it believes have the legal right to work in the United States," said Benjamin Gluck, a lawyer representing Ambiance. "We have reached out to the government to try to learn more about this raid but have not yet learned anything more about it. Ambiance will continue to both follow the law and support its employees, many of whom have been with us for decades." Although it's unclear why Ambiance Apparel was targeted in the recent operation, the company landed on the radar of federal authorities more than a decade ago. In 2014, law enforcement authorities executed dozens of search warrants as part of an investigation into money laundering and other crimes at Fashion District businesses. Federal authorities seized nearly $36 million in cash from Ambiance and the company's owner, Sang Bum 'Ed' Noh, according to a 2020 news release from the U.S. attorney's office in L.A. The company, which was incorporated in 1999, was described by prosecutors as an importer and exporter of textiles and garments from China, Vietnam, Cambodia and elsewhere. Among its customers were retail apparel chains and people who owned small businesses, mostly in Mexico. Its goods can also be found on Amazon, and in Walmart. Federal prosecutors filed charges against Ambiance Apparel and Noh in 2020, accusing them of undervaluing imported garments and avoiding paying millions of dollars in tariffs to the U.S. Among those investigating Ambiance and Noh were Homeland Security Investigations and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, as well as local law enforcement agencies including the Los Angeles and Long Beach police departments. The company was also accused of failing to report cash payments to employees. The government contended that Ambiance employees received "approximately 364 payments of more than $10,000 over a two-year period," totaling more than $11 million. But the company failed to file the required reports on those cash transactions to the federal government, prosecutors said. That same year, Noh pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and one count of subscribing to a false tax return. Ambiance Apparel — the operating name for two corporations, Ambiance U.S.A. Inc. and Apparel Line U.S.A., Inc. — pleaded guilty to eight counts, including conspiracy, money laundering and customs offenses. In 2021, Noh was sentenced to a year in prison 'for scheming to undervalue imported garments and avoid paying millions of dollars in duties to the United States, failing to report millions of dollars in income on tax returns, and failing to report large cash transactions to the federal government,' prosecutors said in a news release. Noh 'made defrauding the United States a significant revenue stream for Ambiance, appropriating approximately $35,227,855.45 from U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Internal Revenue Service in less than four years,' prosecutors said in a sentencing memo. "While [Noh] was cheating the United States and facilitating money laundering, he enjoyed a house in Bel Air, bought luxury cars, and squirreled away bundles of cash worth $35 million in shoeboxes and garbage bags," prosecutors wrote. The company was sentenced to five years' probation and was ordered to implement an effective anti-money laundering compliance and ethics program with an outside compliance monitor. That monitorship was set to end in October of this year. Despite those troubles, the company, and its employees, seemingly continued to thrive. Montserrat Arrazola's father, Jorge, is another of those workers detained Friday. She said her father is the family's "breadwinner," and without his paycheck, there are "hard times coming" for her and her three brothers. Read more: No, Dr. Phil wasn't present at L.A. ICE raids, but he taped interview with Trump's border advisor But it's the pain of separation that hurts her the most. Her family was able to speak to Jorge once, and he told them to stay calm. So Montserrat, a college student who wants to become a social worker, is trying. She talked instead about their recent family outing, when they all tried bowling, and how her dad is charismatic and caring. "He's a family man and he gives all his time to his family," she said. But not being able to contact those detained is stressful, said Carlos Gonzalez. His older brother Jose was also taken by ICE and like others at the protest, Gonzalez called for due process rights. Gonzalez and his brother had gone camping at Sandy Flat in Sequoia National Forest just the weekend before the raid, a rare chance for them to spend time together. Carlos said he received a call from a cousin Friday, and went to Ambiance, but couldn't reach his brother in the chaos. So Gonzalez went to the Metropolitan Detention Center downtown, but was told there were too many people to process, and was unable to get further information. He went back the next morning to try to bring his brother a sweater, because "you don't know if it's cold in there," he said. But he was told his brother had been moved to Santa Ana. That is the last he has heard. His family is caring for Jose's dog Coffee, a 100-plus pound chocolate lab and pit bull mix who cries when Jose isn't near, and working with a lawyer. But there is not much else they can do except wait, and speak out. "I want people to know that this was inhumane," Gonzalez said. "They were just working." Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
