Stolen Homes and Broken Promises: The Crisis Facing Indigenous Families in Washington State

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By Gabe Galanda

October 07, 2024

Guest Opinion. Imagine watching the place you’ve called home for decades suddenly and forcibly stripped away by a system meant to protect your rights. For many Indigenous people in Deming, Washington, this nightmare is their new reality, and without immediate and necessary intervention from Interior Secretary Deb Haaland or Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), it is going to get much worse.

Last week, an appellate court ruled against several Indigenous households who have been threatened with eviction since 2016 after being disenrolled from the Nooksack Tribe. These families are the first to face forced removal, but they are far from alone: over 60 Indigenous people spread across 21 households—many of them tribal elders, wheelchair-bound relatives, and children—now stand on the brink of losing their homes.

These homes, part of a federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, were not just a roof over their heads. The families lived in them, paid rent, and were promised eventual ownership after 15 years of living there, starting between 1999 and 2005. By 2020, the homes should have been conveyed to them. That never happened.

And it brings us to today, where families face an ongoing, years-long saga of human rights calamity so egregious that the United Nations took the step to weigh in not once, but twice on a U.S. tribal matter. Specifically, the UN’s special rapporteurs for adequate housing and Indigenous rights called for the Biden Administration to ‘immediately halt’ the evictions—with third party observers calling the step ‘remarkable’ and ‘unprecedented’.

It is why these families are turning to a last-second call for help to two individuals who can actually stop this: Secretary Haaland and Senator Cantwell. Through Secretary Haaland’s plenary authority over Indian affairs, lands, and housing under federal statute, she can halt the evictions today. And through critical oversight, Senator Cantwell, the former chair of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and champion of the federal Low Income Tax Credit Program (LIHTC), can easily apply the pressure to initiate immediate action.

Expedited action is necessary not just because of the acute, live-saving impact it would have for the Nooksack families, but because this example is a microcosm for a system failure in policy. The LIHTC program, designed to uplift low-income individuals through eventual home ownership, is under audit. Of the 600-plus tribal housing units built through this initiative, not one has been conveyed to an Indigenous buyer. The very intention of Congress, to give tribal communities homeownership opportunities, has been undermined, and must be rectified.

Both officials can also take this moment to address a failure in bureaucracy. Earlier this year, in a desperate attempt to halt the evictions, the Washington State Housing Finance Commission (WSHFC) filed 85 Notices of Violation against the Nooksack Tribe with the IRS. But the IRS, citing a technicality, refuses to intervene once a project reaches its 15-year mark. Their homes should have been safe by then, but instead, the system has locked them into a legal trap.

Only Secretary Haaland and Senator Cantwell have the keys. In June, the families wrote Secretary Haaland asking for help and a meeting—she did not respond. Likewise, in July, the families wrote Senator Cantwell asking for help and a meeting—but their request fell on deaf ears. This despite Senator Cantwell’s state’s flagship paper, the Seattle Times, urging President Biden to immediately intervene and stop the evictions.

All of this is taking place as innocent families await armed police to remove them from their homes as soon as this week. To them, this is not just an ordinary legal battle, but a haunting echo of the centuries-old pattern of displacement of land, homes, and rights of Indigenous people simply looking to live freely and prosperously with the ones they love.

The time for action is now. Secretary Haaland must step in, and Senator Cantwell must raise her voice to protect the Indigenous families living in fear of the next knock on their door. Without action, we are complicit in yet another erasure of Indigenous communities.

Gabe Galanda is an Indigenous rights attorney and the managing lawyer at Galanda Broadman. His practice focuses on complex, multi-party litigation and crisis management, representing Indigenous nations, businesses and citizens.