A South Dakota tribe has banned Gov. Kristi Noem (R) from their land over recent comments about immigration.
“Due to the safety of the Oyate, effective immediately, you are hereby Banished from the homelands of the Oglala Sioux Tribe!” Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out said in a statement addressed to Noem on Friday.
“Oyate” is a word for people or nation, according to the Associated Press.
The tribe leader’s statement comes after Noem’s address to the South Dakota legislature last week where she pledged to continue using state resources to help Texas, and claimed the U.S. “is in a time of invasion.”
“Calling the United States’ southern border in Texas an ‘invasion’ by illegal immigrants and criminal groups to justify sending S.D. National Guard troops there is a red herring that the Oglala Sioux Tribe doesn’t support,” Star Comes Out wrote.
He said many of the migrants crossing the border are seeking “jobs and a better life” and they “don’t deserve to be dehumanized and mistreated.”
“They don’t need to be put in cages, separated from their children like during the Trump Administration, or be cut up by razor wire furnished by, of all places, South Dakota,” he said.
Star Comes Out also accused Noem of using the border issue to help Trump’s re-election bid and boost her chances of becoming his running mate.
“I joined the U.S. Marine Corps and served honorably in foreign wars to protect the freedoms of all Americans, even Indians throughout the nation,” he wrote. “I don’t want to see our Indian people and reservations used as a basis to create a bogus border crisis just to help Trump get re-elected as President and Governor Noem his running mate as Vice-President.”
Noem responded in a statement on Saturday.
“It is unfortunate that President Star Comes Out chose to bring politics into a discussion regarding the effects of our federal government’s failure to enforce federal laws at the southern border and on tribal lands. My focus continues to be on working together to solve those problems,” she said.
