Native Americans are U.S. citizens. Congress made that universal in the Indian Citizenship Act of June 2, 1924. There is no version of immigration enforcement in which detaining one is anything other than an error.

In January 2026, reporter Adora Brown went to Capitol Hill to ask Republicans what Congress should do about the fact that it keeps happening. The answer that ran in the headline came from North Carolina's Addison McDowell.

"There will be mistakes."

That's the NOTUS report, published with Oklahoma Watch on January 26, 2026. McDowell's fuller answer:

"That's not great if that's happening."

And there are "millions" of people who need to be deported, so "it's not going to be a perfect process trying to get all of them out."

Why it lands harder coming from him

McDowell isn't a random member with an opinion on immigration. He sits on the House Natural Resources Committee's subcommittee on Indian and Insular Affairs — the panel in Congress whose specific job is tribal nations and their citizens.

He represents North Carolina, where more than 130,000 American Indians live, including the Lumbee Tribe, which has more than 56,000 members and is the largest tribe east of the Mississippi River.

And the timing is its own comment. The Lumbee had won full federal recognition just five weeks earlier, on December 18, 2025, after a 137-year fight — an achievement North Carolina politicians in both parties lined up to celebrate. Five weeks after that, asked what should be done about Native citizens being pulled off the street and made to prove they belong here, the state's member on the tribal affairs subcommittee said it's not going to be a perfect process.

What "mistakes" means in practice

The reporting describes what is actually happening to people:

• At least five Native American men were detained in Minneapolis in a matter of weeks, according to Indian Country Today.
• A Navajo man in Phoenix was held for hours after producing documentation of his tribal citizenship and his birth certificate.
• Elaine Miles, a Native American actor known for HBO's The Last of Us, said an ICE agent in Washington state questioned her in December and asked, "Are you Mexican?"
• ProPublica reported in October that ICE has held more than 170 U.S. citizens during its raids, including a member of the Mescalero Apache tribe pulled out of a store and asked for his passport.

Tribal officials in several states have started briefing their members on what to do if ICE stops them, and setting up help hotlines. That is what a government failure looks like from the inside: sovereign nations running know-your-rights trainings so their citizens don't get disappeared into a detention system.

Nobody would say what should be done about it

The most damning thing in the piece isn't any single quote. It's that the reporter asked a straightforward question — what should the administration or Congress do to stop this? — and Republicans on the subcommittee wouldn't answer it.

Several said they hadn't heard about it at all. Bruce Westerman, another member of the subcommittee, said, "I wasn't aware that they had arrested Native Americans, but hopefully they resolved it and set them free if they hadn't broken the law." Oklahoma's Kevin Hern said, "I think they're doing the best they can with the information they have." Josh Brecheen, a member of the Choctaw Nation, said law enforcement has "to be reactionary."

McDowell's answer was the one that named the trade-off out loud: the deportation numbers matter more than the citizens caught in them.

Rep. Melanie Stansbury, a vice chair of the Congressional Native American Caucus, put the other view:

"The administration is targeting any person of color at the present moment and violating both the civil and due process rights of countless Americans."

Rep. Adelita Grijalva, also on the subcommittee, has pushed for federal law enforcement to simply accept tribal identification cards:

"What we need to understand is that the indigenous tribes were there before we were. The tribal identification should be enough for the harassment to end."

That is a concrete, cheap, obvious fix. McDowell was asked what should be done. He did not propose it or anything else.

"Mistakes" is doing a lot of work

Trump used almost the same framing days earlier, telling reporters that in the case of Renee Good — one of two U.S. citizens shot and killed by federal agents that month — "They're gonna make mistakes sometimes. ICE is going to be too rough with somebody."

We've covered what those "mistakes" look like when the reporting catches up with them: two people killed by ICE agents in a single week, with the government's account falling apart in both cases, and court records showing agents in Los Angeles using racial slurs to decide who to stop.

"Mistake" implies something rare and accidental. Detaining citizens because of their skin color or their last name, at a scale where tribal governments have to set up hotlines about it, is not an accident. It is what the policy produces. McDowell applauded the budget bill that poured tens of billions into this enforcement surge, and when someone asked him about the people it's hitting, his answer was that you can't get them all out perfectly.

He is on the committee. He could ask for the tribal ID fix. He could ask DHS for numbers. He could hold a hearing.

He said there will be mistakes.

Source

Adora Brown, "Native Americans Are Getting Swept Up by ICE; Republicans Say 'There Will be Mistakes'" — NOTUS and Oklahoma Watch, January 26, 2026.