ICE stops Native American actress Elaine Miles in Redmond

Amid the increase of reports of ICE arrests in the cities surrounding Seattle over the past weeks, a member of a federally recognized tribe says she was also stopped and interrogated by apparent immigration officials.

Elaine Miles is an actress best known for her role in the TV series “Northern Exposure” and, more recently, in an episode of HBO's “The Last of Us.” Miles is a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation near Pendleton, Oregon.

She was waiting for a bus in Redmond on Nov. 3, on the same day ICE arrested three people at a nearby shopping mall. Miles said she was also briefly stopped and questioned about her legal status.

Miles says a man ran up to her and started talking to her. She then noticed he had a hand on his gun.

“And I was looking at him, like, ‘What? What did I do?’” Miles said. “And then he's like, are you Mexican? And I go, ‘No, I'm not. I'm Native American. You want to see my tribal ID?’”

Redmond police did confirm ICE made the arrests at that location, including smashing a man's window to pull him out of a car.

Earlier this year, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation posted a statement on its social media, urging its members to keep their tribal membership cards on them “at all times, especially in PUBLIC,” for circumstances just like this. She said the officer who stopped her initially didn’t believe her tribal membership.

“Then these other men come up,” she said. “And it's scary when they run up on you. It's like, 'what did I do?'”

ICE did not respond to questions about why Miles was stopped, but U.S. immigration law gives agents authority to stop and question people in cases where they have "reasonable suspicion" about an individual’s legal status.

The factors ICE can use to make that determination have recently become the subject of ongoing lawsuits.

In Los Angeles, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling has temporarily allowed immigration enforcement agents operating in that city to use race as one of the reasons for a stop. They can also use people speaking Spanish, accented English, and working certain physical labor jobs to guess if someone is in the country without legal status.

While the legal challenges continue, the ruling in L.A. raises questions about how broadly federal immigration enforcement will be able to use this approach.

Gabe Galanda, a Native American civil rights attorney, refers to what Miles experienced as “racialized profiling.”

“They are being profiled based upon their skin color and their phenotype,” he said. “It's hard to make sense of any of it, but it's particularly hard to make sense of the federal government going after the original peoples of these lands under [the] guise of immigration enforcement.”

Earlier this month, a woman from Arizona’s Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community had an ICE detainer placed on her after serving a monthlong jail sentence in Iowa for driving without a license. It was only when her family brought her birth certificate to the jail that she was let go. The local county sheriff's office in Iowa said it was a human error and she was confused for another detainee with a similar name.

Miles has worked in the film and entertainment industry for decades.

At the beginning of this year, Miles and other co-workers were in New Mexico working on the set of a film where members of the nearby Mescalero Apache Tribe were questioned by ICE. It was a cause for concern, and all tribal members were urged to carry their membership cards.

Days after she was stopped, Miles said her son was also questioned by immigration enforcement at a higher education institution in Bellevue, but they didn’t question his tribal membership like they did for her.

To legal expert Galanda, it’s alarming.

“You should not have the original peoples of this country … for a second feeling uncomfortable about their own sense [of belonging] in this country,” he said. “They belong here more than anybody else in this country.”

The recent mass roundups of immigrant populations reminds Miles of when the U.S. government forcibly removed Japanese Americans from their homes and into internment camps. Miles’ grandmother had Japanese American friends who were taken to the prison camps back then.

“Sometimes they come back,” Miles recalls her grandma saying, “sometimes they didn't come back.”

Miles also remembers her grandma warning her it would happen again. “You can't trust these people,” Miles’ grandmother said. “They're too busy wanting only their country when we were here to begin with.”

Miles points to reports of the federal government planning to use bounty hunters and says it echoes a history of when Native Americans also had bounties placed on them.

Much of the recent messaging from the Department of Homeland Security’s social media appeals to nostalgia, sometimes centralized around white characters. One post titled “A Heritage to be Proud of A Homeland Worth Defending,” shows the painting of American Progress by John Ghast, an allegory to Manifest Destiny. That’s the belief that European American settlers were entitled to expand and control what is now the United States, while pushing others — in the painting's case, Native Americans — out. It and other propaganda shared by the Department of Homeland Security have been repurposed to reinvigorate support for mass immigrant deportation efforts.

“This is reality,” said Miles, now worried about her in-laws and her extended family who come from Mexico and have mixed immigration status. “And it hurts because we have to live through this.”