Trump Administration Removes Report on Missing and Murdered Indigenous People

From the perspective of those who care about Native safety and sovereignty, the Trump administration’s decision to remove the congressionally mandated Not One More Report is profoundly troubling. The report, created under the Not Invisible Act of 2020 and based on more than 250 testimonies, was designed to “provide tribes with solutions” to the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people and educate the public about an “epidemic of violence against Native women, Native people.” Yet, nearly 300 days after it was taken down from the Department of Justice website to comply with an executive order attacking so-called DEI content, it has not been restored.

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, who introduced the act, said she was “astounded” that an administration which signed the law could now treat this life-or-death issue as expendable. She argued that officials “don’t really care about addressing the violent crime in our tribal communities,” and called their actions “ignorant to the fact of the trust and treaty obligation that we have to our tribal communities.” Sen. Lisa Murkowski similarly pushed for the report’s return, noting, “If we don’t know what we don’t know, it’s pretty tough to say it’s a problem.”

Despite tribal leaders’ appeals to exempt nations from DEI crackdowns and preserve their status as a political class, the White House and DOJ insist the removal was simply about following the “Defending Women” order and say the report exists on “external websites.” But as Sen. Tina Smith put it, “If you want to solve a problem, you first have to see it and understand it, and that’s what that work was all about.” She called it “so offensive” that the administration reclassified tribal nations as just another DEI category rather than “sovereign nations, sovereign people.”

Cortez Masto vows to keep pushing: “They can try to keep it off of the website, but the report’s there. The recommendations are there … and we’re still going to move forward to address it.”

Link: Oklahoma Watch