The original 1837 newspaper article is featured below.
If you visit the Department of Homeland Security or Immigration and Customs Enforcement on X, you’ll find posts saying “we’re taking the country back,” “this is what America will look like,” and “we’re being invaded” to justify the abandonment of due process for immigrants of color.
However, it was less than two centuries ago that Native Americans voiced similar warnings while facing violence, land seizure and forced removal by white European settlers.
In an August 1837 open letter to the mayor of New York published in The Native American, the author contended that the celebrated “progress” of European immigration and expansion had devastated Native communities, with the same rationale later used to justify removal and suppress resistance.
America had long been framed as a refuge. Citing Thomas Jefferson’s description of the continent as “an asylum for the oppressed of all nations,” the Native author warned that this generosity carried consequences for those already living there.
“They are still coming among us in great numbers. They came at first as guests, they soon became masters.”
The letter further explains that European settlers did not adapt to Native systems but instead imposed their own, using legal frameworks to reshape settlements through land seizure and suppression of resistance.
“Laws were made for them, not for us. Our opposition is called hostility.”
Over time, the European settlers framed removal of the indigenous people as a necessity. Displacement was presented as protection and justified in the name of safety and order.
It is a complex and uncomfortable history, one that carries particular weight as calls for mass deportations grow louder and familiar language is once again used to justify exclusion, displacement and the erosion of due process.
