'It Needs Absolute Involvement': GOP Lawmaker Urges Doug Burgum To Support Law Enforcement In Tribes

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Secretary, for being here. I want to talk to you about two things in the time that we have left. Number one is tribal law enforcement. The other one's battlefield and national parks. Each year, Chairman Simpson and ranking member Pingry hope a tribal w hold a tribal witness roundt event spanning over multiple days where tribes across the nation come to share their testimonies with Congress. Conversations are extremely valuable and always moving and especially on the treaty violation issue. But last year our conversation I highlighted my concern with the lack of law enforcement available in Indian country. FBI has recommended 2.4 officers per thousand people in a high crime area. I'd say that's probably inadequate. Some tribes have less than 6 officers per thousand people. This gap has allowed organized crime to take major advantage of our tribal lands whether it's human trafficking or the traffic uh trafficking of narcotics. I understand you're familiar with this issue from your time as serving of governor of North Dakota. I know you know you're working on it, but murdered and mission missing indigenous people and their relatives for me and for this entire uh committee is an extremely important issue and under your watch. I think this can be solved but it needs absolute involvement from your from your uh personal office to help deal with this. The other one is um Battlefield National Parks and when my son Jack comes up to visit me in Washington, we take time to visit one of the nearby parks. Uh Gettysburg is in an outstanding shape. Antidum, not so much.

[00:01:27]Needs some help. Uh he's a major history buff. Uh but his food new favorite place is Fort Washington. And uh it it uh it's an incredible value to have had this park in the local area. It's only 25 minutes south of here. Um, but I'd like to show you some pictures of Fort Washington. And I'm not doing this to put you on the spot only because Stenny Hoyer, it's in his district and he and I are going to go visit it together. It's a beautiful place, but it needs some serious work and not in the matter of tens of millions of dollars. But if you use utilize John now or David Rubenstein, American Battlefield Trust or something like that, partner with some of these lesser um visited parks, I think it would go a long way. What we have here is the batteries down at at u at Fort Washington and and you go down some steps. Anybody can go down here and have access to these. These doors right here are gigantic. This is they're about 15 ft high. I should have taken a picture with somebody there, but they're hanging off their hinges and they're a safety issue. They can be taken off or replaced for a few thousand. Let's see the next one. Grace, this is the watch house at the gate. The main gate is right here. It's a beautiful facility. It's absolutely built like a Mac truck. Um, there's another term that I would normally use, but Mac truck's going to have to do. So, there's some drainage coming off of here, and it's coming out of here's the the main gate to the fort right here.

[00:02:48]You can see some of the some of this is has gone away. Some leakage right here.

[00:02:53]And then we'll show the next picture.

[00:02:55]This is inside the gate house where it's just literally falling down. People have access to all of this stuff. and there's some some bricks that are falling down.

[00:03:04]It wouldn't take too much money to fix something like that up. But for safety reasons, and if you haven't been to Fort Washington, I encourage everybody to go to it. But anyway, it's it's just something that's a a high priority and if we can't fix these and make them look like they're supposed to, then we need to shut them down until they are fixed.

[00:03:21]The priority that I had today was in the short time that we had left, I want to be respectful of your time, is the the MMIPL uh MMIPR issue. if you could engage me on what you've been doing on that.

[00:03:34]>> A happy let me first say thanks for bringing the photos and one of the things that of course is in the budget uh that came from the White House was a $10 billion uh capital expenditure fund for deferred maintenance for the capital region which would include Fort Washington. Uh because we've got a lot of examples like that that are out there. So thank you for bringing those to light.

[00:03:53]>> Oh by the way thank you. Uh there were three uh FTEEs until last year. the the elderly uh park uh ranger who knew everything about that place. She retired and they didn't fix it. There's hundreds of acres out there and only two park rangers. So, that's a big deal, too.

[00:04:07]But, thank you for that.

[00:04:09]>> Thank you. Uh uh yes, as as you noted uh have uh sadly direct experience in this as governor where we had multiple cases uh of uh missing and murdered indigenous in this case women uh in North Dakota.

[00:04:24]uh is where I first became aware of the fact that there was a you know case load of of uh over 6,000 cases that the uh FBI has uh with very little resource against it and and I was always uh shocked by that uh as as I think anyone is because it's a I mean our nation has the ability if we you know lose a co-ed on spring break there's going to be a 10-p part Netflix series about it and then uh someone goes missing and you know, from one of our tribal reservations and it barely makes the local paper. And we we last year we had one of our advisory boards, I had 12 regions, two each 24 tribal leaders there. We uh as part of that, we had uh uh the FBI attend for the first time over at Interior, invited them over to hear firsthand. We had families that were there that had lost uh lost family members. Uh every but everybody around that table's familiar with it. So trying to raise uh raise awareness. Uh the FBI last year agreed for the first time to commit to have a task force u to uh work on it. But as you know there a lot of these things are cold cases which is again which then goes back to the lack of local law enforcement and in some cases uh the reporting time frame in North Dakota on cases that we thought we might have been able to resolve. uh you know nobody reported it till five days you know well we thought she was here we thought she was there thought she was you know doing this and then and then all a sudden no then they're gone then we can kind of leap into uh leap into action fortunately in in North Dakota we had worked hard to developus between uh the our own state BCI and our state highway patrol where we actually had the ability to get in because some parts of our country there are nous and so local law enforcement so it goes straight from the tribe to the feds and and you're basically calling, you know, a regional or Washington DC office and it hasn't been a hasn't been a priority. So, in terms of law enforcement in general, we're underst staffed. We got capital capital maintenance and equipment needs relative to uh both, you know, detention centers uh that we have around the country. And detention centers aren't like, oh, it's just like a building to, you know, for that. We in Eastern Montana, we had a case there on Crow Reservation, which is huge, where there was not a detention center. The one that was there is closed down. Looked probably like the one like the photos you had.

[00:06:47]So there's a someone who commits a minor crime, knows he's going to get hauled off by the one person who's on patrol at night. Got to drive him over to Lame Deer. Well, he's over there. Then the drug deal is going on over here. You know, or in an organized way. This person's going to get released. You know, they do that and then in the crossfire, a 10-year-old kid is killed. you know, I mean, this is I mean, these are the the nasty side effects if we don't have the if we don't have uh the right kind of uh staffing and the right kind of resources to do it. And as you noted, uh there is organized crime. I've had some some people have said, "Oh, that's not true."

[00:07:24]In North Dakota, we did an organized event with the uh back in uh uh when I was governor that involved uh state, federal, local, and tribal. And we arrested 55 people in one day across three reservations. All of them with ties back to a gang in Detroit that was tied to a cartel in Mexico. And they were coming into North Dakota on Amtrak where there's no TSA. So get on get on Amtrak with a bag of guns, a bag of of pills, and a bag of cash and get off at Devil's Lake to go to Spirit Lake. They would get off at Rugby to go to Turtle Mountain, and they would get off at May not to go to MHA. Uh, and they they were uh, you know, organized, recruiting, selling, you know, all of the things that they were doing. And so it's a um it's a it's a real it's a real issue. If if there's other ideas that you have about how this committee on how we can get more resources specifically against this uh be be interested to collaborate with any or all of you on that front.

[00:08:23]>> Well, I think popular culture it's starting to become a big deal. We're seeing a lot of TV shows and I'm sorry that it's it's taken this much, but uh it is in popular culture it's become an issue and I'm I'm glad to see that it's become an an issue and that people are talking about.

[00:08:38]I'll just close with this because we're out of time. Thank you for indulging me.

[00:08:42]Is that American Indian and Alaskan Native women experience a murder rate 10 times higher than the national average.

[00:08:48]I'd like to close with that. It's tragic. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Q.