Trespass

UNITED STATES

For millennia, Indigenous Nations were the stewards of every inch of this continent. Today, we acknowledge that all of the land beneath our country’s carceral institutions–including each juvenile detention center, immigration holding facility, and every other site where children are held–is land stolen from those Indigenous peoples.

All 1,275+ facilities that cage our children—the detention centers, the youth prisons, the residential treatment facilities, the holding sites—occupy territory taken by force and never returned. Before these buildings held children, the same ground held boarding schools designed to erase Indigenous identity. The institutions changed names. The theft did not.

This is a recognition that the very ground on which these facilities sit carries the memory of historic injustice, and that the practice of locking up children is intertwined with a legacy of colonial violence that began with the theft of Indigenous homelands and continues in new forms today.
Indigenous children are incarcerated at nearly four times the rate of white youth: 199 per 100,000 compared to 52 per 100,000. The children of dispossessed peoples are disproportionately caged on the land dispossessed from them.

Please let that sit in your spirit. The same families whose land was stolen are now watching their children locked up on that stolen ground at four times the rate of the colonizers’ descendants. We cannot seek justice for any of our children without also addressing the foundation of injustice beneath their feet. And yet most talk about carceral injustice as if the ground itself is neutral.
And now, in 2025, we are watching something so obscene it eclipses articulation: Native people—including young people—are being profiled and detained by federal immigration agents on lands that have always been theirs.

Indigenous citizens treated as foreigners in their own country. A Navajo youth detained for nine hours by ICE until relatives could scramble to provide proof of her tribal enrollment. Three citizens of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate taken into ICE custody without cause, even after showing their tribal IDs, released only after outside intervention. Native people lined up behind white vans and questioned for two hours before being allowed to contact family members. Tribal leaders from Montana to Arizona voicing fears that their members could be swept up in immigration raids simply for being brown in their own Native land.

The terrifying irony. The descendants of this land’s first peoples are being forced to prove their right to exist on the very lands stolen from their ancestors. The words shouldn’t even fit together in a sentence, and yet here we are.

We also acknowledge the Borderlands truth, because the theft didn’t stop at Indigenous nations. Nearly half of what is now the American West was taken from Mexico in 1848, and it is now that very community that is under attack from our current regime. In these states—where the border later cut communities in two—descendants of those families, many of whom are also Indigenous to this land, now face policing and immigration enforcement on territory seized from their ancestors. At least 30 Indigenous communities straddle the international boundary that now divides Mexico and the U.S. Think about that: a border drawn through Indigenous land, and now Indigenous people on both sides treated as suspects on their own territory.
The same land that was stolen now cages the children of those it was stolen from. The same sovereignty that was denied is now invoked to threaten removal. The displacement that began in 1492 continues through juvenile injustice, child welfare, and immigration enforcement. Different agencies, same theft, same logic: certain lands are takeable, certain children are cageable.

On this Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we state plainly: the carceral system that holds children and the colonial project that stole land are not separate histories. They are continuous, interlocking, and active. They share architects, logic, and purpose. The through-line from 1492 to tonight’s detention intake is unbroken. Indigenous youth sit in cells built on their ancestors’ ground. Indigenous families face agents demanding proof of belonging on their own homelands by the descendants of the invaders. The machinery of dispossession refines itself into new bureaucratic forms, and most of the world has learned to look away.

We refuse.

The Trespass Project stands with Indigenous nations, with Indigenous youth in detention, with Indigenous families facing enforcement on their own land, and with all children who have been separated from their families by systems that treat them as collateral.


Cayden Brown
Executive Director, The Trespass Project
October 13, 2025