As Indigenous Peoples, we know the land does not — and never has — recognized colonial borders. Neither does the wind. Neither do the rivers and oceans. Neither does climate collapse. Our communities are being displaced not by migration, but by extraction, war, and greed.

Migrants are not the crisis.

The U.S. government manufactures it. Colonialism built it. Capitalism sustains it. The true threat is a system that trades lives and land for profit. Built on stolen land with stolen bodies, the U.S. has always treated life — human and nonhuman — as property to be controlled, commodified, and exploited. Its foundation is rooted in colonial doctrines of domination — over people, over women, over nature, and over Mother Earth herself.

The escalating militarization of the U.S. border is not just racist — it is preparation. The government is bracing for the climate chaos and economic collapse it helped create. Its plan is not resilience or care — it is repression. Fascism disguised as immigration policy.

ICE doesn’t enforce safety, it enforces terror. 

It disappears our relatives. It kidnaps children. It cages our kin. It targets Indigenous migrants, like the 34,000 identified by Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo (CIELO) in LA County alone — many of whom are already fleeing environmental destruction, land theft, and colonial violence.

These actions are not isolated. They are part of a coordinated, transnational imperial agenda. What the U.S. funds in Palestine, it practices at home. Surveillance, displacement, militarized policing, apartheid walls, and the criminalization of resistance — these are not foreign policies. They are settler-colonial policies. We witnessed this at Standing Rock with the police militarization tactics leading to the arrest and criminalization of Indigenous Peoples and allies peacefully standing up defending Lakota Treaty Rights that included the right to protect the water and the sacred areas being desecrated by the crude oil Dakota Access Pipeline.

Under the Trump administration, these systems didn’t just grow — they metastasized, like stage IV cancer spreading through the political body. His regime normalized open fascism, white nationalism, and authoritarian violence. But we must be clear: these structures are not new. They are foundational. Biden may have softened the language, but the machinery is still running, and even more so with Trump in office. 

We are living through an implosion of empire — and the state is responding the only way it knows how: with more violence.

But we will not be silent. We will not be divided. And we refuse to turn our backs on our kin across colonial borders and protect migrants in the U.S. from discriminatory practices, exploitation and violence, and upholding their freedom of movement and association.

We, as Indigenous Peoples, stand in solidarity with Black, migrant, Palestinian, People of Color, and working-class communities. We are not collateral damage — we are the collective future.

Justice must be global. Justice must include Indigenous Peoples. Justice must be rooted in land, love, and liberation — not in borders, cages, or imperial war machines.

From Turtle Island to Los Angeles to Gaza, we fight for life. We fight for each other. We fight for a world without occupation, domination, extraction, or exploitation — where Mother Earth and the land is honored, where people have dignity and human rights and all people are free, where liberation knows no borders.