For hours, Raelyn Duffy searched for any information that could lead to the whereabouts of her son, Jose Roberto “Beto” Ramirez, who that morning had been forcibly removed from his aunt’s car and detained by masked federal immigration officers in Robbinsdale, Minn.
Ramirez, 20, is Native American — and a U.S. citizen. But video of his arrest last Thursday shows that the officers were unmoved by his aunt’s panicked screams informing them of his legal status. They yanked Ramirez from the passenger’s seat, slammed him on the hood of another car, handcuffed him and took him away.
Friends identified Ramirez from a Facebook Live video of the arrest and alerted Duffy, who rushed home, grabbed her son’s birth certificate and called Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Ramirez, a descendant of the Red Lake Nation, a federally recognized Ojibwe tribe in northern Minnesota, was held in custody for about 10 hours, his mother said in an interview. He is among several Native Americans who have allegedly been swept up in the Trump administration’s surge in immigration enforcement operations in the Minneapolis area that began late last month and has escalated since a U.S. citizen was fatally shot by an ICE agent last week.
Despite widespread protests over the killing of Renée Good, Trump administration officials say they are surging hundreds more immigration officers into the city and surrounding areas.
Tribal leaders and members who live in the greater Minneapolis area say Indigenous family members, friends and neighbors have been stopped, questioned, harassed and, in some cases, detained solely on the basis of their skin color or their names. Some immigration experts suggested ICE officers might have racially profiled them and mistaken them for being Hispanic.
Like Ramirez, four members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe were detained by ICE officers soon after the Minneapolis operation began, according to tribal president Frank Star Comes Out. Tribal leaders for days unsuccessfully sought information about their status before learning that one man had been released, he said in a statement Tuesday.
The other three remain in custody at the B.H. Whipple Federal Building in Fort Snelling, on the outskirts of Minneapolis, where ICE has detained people arrested in the enforcement operation, he said.
“Members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe are United States citizens,” Star Comes Out said. “We are the first Americans. We are not undocumented immigrants, and we are not subject to unlawful immigration enforcement actions by ICE or Homeland Security.”
Star Comes Out did not identify the men; he said he is basing his accounts of their arrests on information offered by the tribal community. The Washington Post was unable to independently verify the men’s names or confirm their arrests.
The Whipple Building stands on the site of a military fort that, during the Dakota War of 1862 between Native American and white settlers, was used to imprison Indigenous people. Two Dakota leaders were executed at Fort Snelling in 1865.
“The irony is not lost on us,” Star Comes Out said in the statement. “Lakota citizens who are reported to be held at Fort Snelling … underscores why treaty obligations and federal accountability matter today, not just in history.”
The Department of Homeland Security disputed the tribe’s allegations, saying it has no record of its immigration officers detaining the tribe members.
“We have not uncovered any claims by individuals in our detention centers that they are members of the Oglala Sioux tribe,” a spokesperson said in response to questions from the Post.
In Ramirez’s case, Duffy said she heard from him only after he had been held for hours at the Whipple Building. Upon his release, Ramirez regained access to his phone and called her to tell her what had happened.
“The upper part of his back, back of his neck, you could just see all of it — scratches, or like marks from being hit,” Duffy said, describing injuries she said resulted from his arrest. “He was all marked up. His hands had cuts from the handcuffs.”
She added: “It’s racial profiling. It’s crazy.”
The DHS spokesperson did not respond to the Post’s question about Ramirez.
Elizabeth Hidalgo Reese, Yunpoví, a scholar of American Indian tribal law at Stanford Law School who was born in the Nambé Pueblo, a Tewa-speaking tribe in northern New Mexico, noted that Minnesota has 11 federally recognized tribes and suggested that Native Americans are “getting caught up in this search for Brown people who look a certain way.”
Some Democratic state lawmakers are speaking out. State Sen. Mary Kunesh and state Reps. Heather Keeler and Liish Kozlowski, members of the Native American Caucus, expressed concerns in recent days that “countless” Native American community members in Minnesota have reported “being harassed, stopped without cause, and interrogated for documentation.”
The Oglala Sioux Tribe’s leaders said they notified federal officials that detaining tribal members under federal immigration authority is not only unlawful but also violates binding treaties between the federal government and the tribe.
“These are sovereign nations,” Kunesh said in an interview. “Using members of the tribe as pawns in micromanaging or emotionally manipulating tribes is just abhorrent.”
Star Comes Out said that federal authorities said they would provide more information on the detained tribe members only if tribal leaders entered into an agreement with ICE that would empower the leaders to help make immigration arrests.
The Trump administration has pressured localities across the country into what are known as “287(g) agreements,” which deputize local law enforcement to assist in federal immigration enforcement. More than 1,300 jurisdictions across 40 states have entered the agreements, according to ICE. That is up from 135 at the end of fiscal 2024, according to a study by the Migration Policy Institute.
In a letter to several Trump administration officers, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Star Comes Out said the tribe would not entertain such an agreement.
“We will not enter an agreement that would authorize, or make it easier, for ICE or Homeland Security to come onto our tribal homeland to arrest or detain our tribal members,” he wrote.
Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, said the idea that DHS would leverage information on detainees to pressure tribes to enter 287(g) pacts raises “very real concerns.”
Asked about the allegations, the DHS spokesperson said: “ICE did NOT ask the tribe for any kind of agreement. We have simply asked for basic information on the individuals, such as names and date of birth so that we can run a proper check to provide them with the facts.”
Kozlowski, who is of Anishinaabe Ojibwe and Mexican American descent, said the situation highlights the imperative for Native Americans in Minnesota to remain outspoken and vigilant about defending their rights.
“Trump [is] saying: If you don’t come along with our agenda and enter into agreements and your places of business and lands don’t support us, then we will crush you,” Kozlowski said. “But the thing is that they’ve never been able to crush our spirits — ever.”
