Billie Eilish Said "No One Is Illegal on Stolen Land"— In Reality, The Theft of Native Land Is a Blueprint for Border Patrol and ICE

The slogan sparked outrage across the political spectrum, but the connection between Native dispossession and immigration enforcement is structural, not symbolic.

This month, pop superstar Billie Eilish won a Grammy for her single “Wildflower.” But the award was not what made headlines.

“As grateful as I feel, I honestly don’t feel like I need to say anything,” Eilish started her acceptance speech, “but that no one is illegal on stolen land.”

Billy Eilish accepts her Grammy

In the long month of January 2026, federal officers operating under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown tear-gassed an infant, tackled public school teachers, dragged a disabled woman out of her car, detained a preschooler, and killed two American citizens on the streets of Minneapolis. This the violence that sparked national outrage and Billie Eilish’s comments. “It’s just really hard to know what to say and what to do right now,” the singer continued, “I feel like we just need to keep fighting and speaking up and protesting.”

“Fuck ICE,” she concluded.

The backlash to Eilish’s acceptance speech at the 68th annual Grammy Award was immediate. Republican and right-wing leaders were outraged by the singer’s comments, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz. “One simple question: are we right now on stolen land?” Cruz asked a Netflix executive during a Senate hearing days later.

“When you see an entertainer say, ‘Nobody is illegal while we’re on stolen land,’” Cruz went on. “And then you see entertainers leap to their feet, clapping so excitedly at the notion that America is fundamentally illegitimate, it starts to convey that the entertainment world is deeply corrupt.”

So to recap, in the past two weeks, the slogan “no one is illegal on stolen land” received a standing ovation at the Grammys, scrutiny at a Senate hearing, and widespread debate on social media. But what does that slogan actually mean?

Senator Ted Cruz at the Senate hearing

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This post was written as a contribution from Rebecca Nagle. Rebecca Nagle is an award-winning journalist and citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Nagle’s debut book, By The Fire We Carry: the Generations-long Fight for Justice on Native Land, was an instant national bestseller and a New Yorker Book of the Year. Nagle is also the writer and host of the podcast This Land. You can read more from her on her Substack Native America.

If you have recommendations for academics or experts who should contribute to the newsletter, let us know in the comments below!

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While I agree with the moral conviction behind “no one is illegal on stolen land,” legally, it’s wrong. In fact, the opposite is true. It is because the land is stolen that the U.S. government is able to decide whose presence is legal or not. It is the reason our immigration policies are so inhumane. What the U.S. did to Native Americans became the blueprint for how we treat those pushed to the edge of our democracy.

It all goes back to federal Indian law. The Trump administration and ICE have been operating with impunity because we first gave our president broad, unchecked powers to colonize and take Indigenous land. That power is still baked into our government. The U.S. border is so heavily militarized because, for the first century and a half of our republic, it was a literal war zone. ICE can arrest and detain people without judicial warrants because the early architects of immigration law didn’t want to deal with pesky things like constitutional rights, so they decided to treat immigrants like other people the United States had colonized, including Native Americans.

To explain, I need to start at the beginning.

How our country treated Native Americans became the blueprint for U.S. immigration law

When our founders looked out across the great continent of North America, they saw land governed and inhabited by hundreds of Indigenous nations. And they had a choice. They could extend the liberal ideals of democracy enshrined in our founding documents. Or they could take Indigenous land by force. Our founders chose force. And from that choice, they built a government with two faces. The first face we all know. It dictates how our government treats its own citizens. These are the constitutional principles we hold so dear, like free speech, freedom of religion, and elected representation.

But our government has another face. One that doesn’t come with due process, checks and balances, or elections. And that is the face of empire. Rather than being governed by consent, Indigenous peoples were governed by conquest. This is not a mere fact of history, but part of the structure of our government today. And while our country has seen great upheavals and profound change, the arm of empire never went away. Today, when our government wants to detain immigrants, separate families at the border, invade Venezuela, or order federal officers to pull people from their cars and homes, it uses the power it first gave itself to colonize Indigenous nations to do so.

My thinking on this topic is grounded in the work of Ojibwe legal scholar Maggie Blackhawk. To put it simply, she argues that we don’t see what our country did to Native Americans as a fundamental, constitutional problem, but we should. Because how our country treated Native Americans is the foundation for how we treat other people living at the margins of U.S. empire. Her Harvard Law Review article, The Constitution of American Colonialism, is a deep dive into this topic if you want to read more.

The march of the U.S. empire did not end with Indigenous people. In the late 1800s and the early 1900s, the U.S. colonized far-away places like the Philippines and Guam. The architects of American colonization in foreign land borrowed heavily from what we had done right here at home. In the Philippines, Howard Taft created civilizing programs almost identical to what the U.S. did to Native Americans, including boarding schools. When the U.S. colonized Puerto Rico, it replaced the island’s autonomous government with martial law. Military rule was how the U.S. had already learned to expand from Ohio to Oregon. When the great legal minds¹ of the 20th century set out to develop our modern immigration system, they consciously modeled it after the colonies. They liked the fact that in the colonies, the president had power without constitutional limits. They liked that under administrative law, the courts have less say. And so they built a similar system.

From Colonization to ICE

One question I keep hearing is: how can Trump get away with this? Why can’t anyone stop ICE? To colonize Indigenous people, our country gave the president a lot of power: the power to execute people, to govern large territories by military rule, to install puppet governments, to take children from their parents, and even to round up entire populations and hold them in detention and concentration camps. In the wake of all that violence, we didn’t change our government. We never took that power away from the president of the United States. And that power is what Trump is drawing on today.

The United States' immigration system is unique. In other countries, citizenship affords things like access to social benefits or voting. But in the United States, citizenship comes with something else. Not just benefits, but rights. We built a constitution that–on purpose–doesn’t protect people who are not U.S. citizens. The constitution is exclusionary. From Indigenous nations to Guam and Puerto Rico, to immigrants in detention camps, there have always been people who lived under the raw power of our government, but not the protections of our Constitution.

Citizenship as a Shield - and a Weapon

I don’t know the exact origins of the slogan “no one is illegal on stolen land.” (If you do, please drop it in the comments.) But before Billie Eilish, the only people I had heard say it were Native. Coming from Native mouths, it’s a statement of solidarity, because our lands operate with a different set of rules than the United States.

Tribes govern over 300 reservations in the United States. We also have strong ties to land outside of those legal boundaries. As Indigenous nations, it is our place–not the U.S. government–to say who is welcome on our land. This authority to welcome visitors is recognized among Indigenous nations. Sometimes it looks formal, like the way visiting nations were recognized at the Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock. (Or even the way South Dakota tribes banned Kristi Noem from their reservations when she was Governor.) It can also look less formal, like exchanging gifts or giving welcoming remarks. “No one is illegal on stolen land” is a way for Native people to say to immigrants: you are welcome here. And to point out the deep hypocrisy of a country that invaded our homelands now calling other people the invaders.

I’m not making these points to police who can say “no one is illegal on stolen land.” That’s not my place–nor would I want it to be. What I liked about the debate over Eilish’s speech was that people finally started connecting how our country treated Indigenous people in its founding to how we treat immigrants today. What I wish more people understood is that the relationship is not abstract. Like the structure of a building, it is foundational.

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Sources

1. Turner, Mariel. “Billie Eilish, Finneas O’Connell Win Song of the Year, Slam ICE at Grammys: ‘No One Is Illegal On Stolen Land’.” The Hollywood Reporter, February 1, 2026.

   https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/music/music-news/billie-eilish-ice-no-one-illegal-song-of-year-grammys-2026-1236492156/.

2. Galgano, Taylor. “Minneapolis family, six children tear gassed after they were caught in clash between ICE and protesters.” CNN, January 17, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/17/us/minneapolis-family-tear-gassed-ice

3. Murphy, Joe and Corky Siemaszko. “Minneapolis schools cancel classes after ICE raid at high school the same day Renee Nicole Good was killed.” NBC News, January 8, 2026.

   https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/minneapolis-schools-cancel-classes-ice-raid-high-school-day-renee-nico-rcna253081.

4. Goodman, Amy. “Meet Aliya Rahman, Disabled U.S. Citizen Assaulted, Jailed & Traumatized by ICE in Minneapolis.” Democracy Now, February 9, 2026. https://www.democracynow.org/2026/2/9/minneapolis_ice.

5. Medina, Regina. “‘He’s not the same’: Father of Liam Conejo Ramos says 5-year-old continues to suffer.” MPR News, February 9, 2026. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/02/09/father-of-liam-conejo-ramos-says-he-continues-to-suffer-after-ice-detention-release

6. Arkin, Daniel. “Hit record.” NBC News, January 29, 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/renee-good-alex-pretti-shootings-spark-minneapolis-protesters-video-ic-rcna256350

7. Blackhawk, Maggie. “The Constitution of American Colonialism.” Harvard Law Review, 137 Harv. L. Rev. 1 (2023).

   https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-137/the-constitutionalism-of-american-colonialism/.

1. One of those legal minds was Felix Frankfurter, who taught law at Harvard, helped found the ACLU, and eventually served on the Supreme Court. He advocated for the application of some big legal principles (that were first developed in the arena of federal Indian law) to immigration law. Those principles include things like judicial restraint and the plenary power doctrine. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry. To put it simply, Frankfurter thought the court shouldn’t have much say over immigration and that the president should have a lot of power. As a Supreme Court Justice, he voted to uphold Japanese internment camps.