MAYETTA, Kan. (AP) — The Potawatomi Nation of the Prairie Band, whose ancestors were uprooted by the U.S. from the Great Lakes region in the 1830s, is facing outrage from fellow Native Americans over plans to profit from another forced removal: President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
A newly formed tribal business entity quietly signed a nearly $30 million federal contract in October to come up with an early design for U.S. immigration detention centers.
Tribal leaders and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not respond to detailed questions about why the firm was selected for such a large contract without having to compete for the work as federal contracting normally requires. A former naval officer — who bills himself as the go-to adviser for tribes and related companies seeking federal contracts — formed the affiliate, KPB Services LLC, in April.
The criticism was so intense that the 4,500-member tribe said it fired the economic development leaders who brokered the deal.
“We are known throughout the nation now as traitors and traitors to another race of people,” said Ray Rice, a 74-year-old man who said he and other tribal members were blindsided. “We’re brown and they’re brown.”
ICE dealings with tribes generate control
Tribal Chairman Joseph “Zeke” Rupnick promised “full transparency” about what he described as an “evolving situation.” In a video message to tribal members Friday, he said the tribe is talking with legal counsel about ways to terminate the contract.
He alluded to the time federal agents forcibly removed hundreds of Prairie Band Potawatomi families from their homes and eventually herded them onto a reservation just north of Topeka.
“We know that our reservations in India were the government’s first attempts to reach detention centers,” Rupnick said in the video message. “We were put here because we were prisoners of war. So we have to ask ourselves why we would ever participate in something that mirrors the harm and trauma once done to our people.”
The US Supreme Court cleared the way in September for federal agents to conduct large immigration raids and use apparent ethnicity as a relevant factor in stops. With some Native Americans swept up and detained in recent raids, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s proposals to tribes and even long-standing agreements are generating additional scrutiny.
An LLC owned by the Poarch Band of Creek Indians in Alabama also has a multi-million dollar contract with ICE to provide financial and administrative services. Meanwhile, some shareholders of an Alaska Native corporation say their values don’t align with the corporation’s federal contracting arm, Akima, to provide security at several ICE detention facilities.
“I’m shocked that there’s any tribal nation that’s willing to help the U.S. government with this,” said Brittany McKane, a 29-year-old Muscogee Nation citizen who attends the tribe’s college in Oklahoma.
Some tribal nations have advised their citizens to carry tribal IDs.
Last month, actor Elaine Miles said she was stopped by ICE agents who claimed her ID from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon was fake.
Economic pressure increases as federal funding declines
The tribes’ economic arms, which can be run by non-Natives, are under increasing pressure to generate revenue because of declining federal funding, high inflation and competition from online gambling, said Gabe Galanda, a Seattle-based indigenous rights attorney.
But the economic opportunities presented to tribes don’t always align with their values, said Galanda, a member of the Round Valley Indian Tribes of northern California.
The Prairie Band Potawatomi has a wide range of businesses offering healthcare management staffing, general contracting and even interior design.
The tribal arm employed by ICE – KPB Services LLC – was established in Holton, Kansas, and is not listed on the tribe’s website. It previously qualified along with dozens of other companies to provide logistics support to the US Navy, although to date it has not performed any work for the federal government.
The ICE contract was originally awarded in October for $19 million for unspecified “due diligence and design projects” for U.S. processing centers and detention facilities, according to a one-sentence description of the work in the federal government’s real-time contracts database. It was amended a month later to raise the salary cap to $29.9 million. Sole-source contracts over $30 million require additional justification under federal contracting rules.
The contract raises a number of questions and appears to run counter to the Trump administration’s stated goal of cleaning up waste, fraud and abuse, said attorney Joshua Schnell, who specializes in federal contract law.
“Public confidence in the federal procurement system depends on transparency and competition,” Schnell said. “While there is a role in this system for multimillion-dollar single-source contracts, these contracts are an exception to statutory competition requirements, and taxpayers have a right to know how the government spends its money.”
The quick reaction as news of the ICE contract spreads
It is not clear what the Tribal Council knew about the contract. A spokesman for the Tribal Council did not respond to repeated requests from the AP for details, including who was fired.
What is known is that KPB was registered by Ernest C. Woodward Jr., a retired U.S. naval officer with degrees in engineering and business who is a member of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, according to a website for his consulting firm, Burton Woodward Partners LLC.
The website described Woodward as a serial entrepreneur and tribal advisor in mergers and acquisitions, accessing capital and obtaining federal contracts. The consulting firm was registered in an office park in Sarasota, Florida, in 2017, but delisted two years later after failing to file an annual report.
The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, in a 2017 news release, said Woodward’s firm advised it on the acquisition of another government contractor, Mill Creek LLC, which specializes in furnishing federal buildings and the military with office furniture and medical equipment.
Woodward is also listed as the chief operating officer of the Florida branch of Prairie Band Construction Inc., which was incorporated in September.
Attempts to locate Woodward were unsuccessful. The phone number listed on Burton Woodward Partners was disconnected and did not respond to an email sent to another consulting firm with which it is affiliated, Virginia-based Chinkapin Partners LLC.
Carole Cadue-Blackwood, who has Prairie Band Potawatomi ancestry and is an enrolled member of the Kickapoo tribe in Kansas, hopes the contract will end. She was part of the fight against the opening of an ICE detention center in Leavenworth, Kansas, and works for a Native American social services agency.
“I’m in total disbelief that this has happened,” she said.
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Hollingsworth reported from Mission, Kansas, and Goodman from Miami. Graham Lee Brewer in Norman, Oklahoma and Hallie Golden in Seattle contributed to this report.