The DOJ Took Down a Report on Indigenous People — Mandated by a Law Trump Signed — to Comply With an Anti-DEI Order

The Trump administration took down a congressionally mandated report on missing and murdered Native Americans from the Department of Justice’s website nearly 300 days ago to comply with an executive order against diversity, equity and inclusion.

It’s still not back online yet, and the senators who worked to pass the law are furious.

The Not One More Report was the product of The Not Invisible Act of 2020, which intends to provide tribes with solutions to combat the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous people and educate the general public about the crisis. The act was signed into law by President Donald Trump in his first term.

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a moderate Democrat from Nevada who sits on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and introduced that act, said she was “outraged” to see the report had vanished from the federal forum.

“It is astounding that an administration that actually signed these bills into law, that wants to address the issue of keeping our communities safe from violent criminals, including our tribal communities, thinks that this isn’t an important issue,” Cortez Masto told NOTUS during an interview in her Capitol Hill office.

The report was taken down amid a purge of material from federal websites that the Trump administration deemed DEI-related. Both Cortez Masto and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator from Alaska who chairs the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, told NOTUS that they reached out to the administration to inquire about restoring the Not One More Report.

Murkowski said that she wants the report restored “so that the information is out there.”

“If we don’t know what we don’t know, it’s pretty tough to say it’s a problem,” she said.

A commission including tribal leaders, human trafficking survivors, relatives of victims, and federal partners compiled the report from over 250 testimonies from tribal members about how the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people has affected their lives. It also gave recommendations on how to alleviate the crisis — like having the U.S. Marshals Service help tribal law enforcement address the MMIP crisis, the premise of legislation that Cortez Masto recently introduced alongside Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.

On Feb. 3, over a dozen tribal leadership and advocacy organizations sent a letter to the administration and several high-ranking lawmakers who work on tribal affairs, urging them to preserve tribal members’ “legal status as a political class rather than a suspect racial class,” and exempt tribal nations from DEI-related crack downs. Less than a week later, Cortez Masto’s office noticed the Not One More Report was no longer available on the DOJ’s website.

“It’s an epidemic of violence against Native women, Native people,” Senate Indian Affairs Committee member Tina Smith told NOTUS. “If you want to solve a problem, you first have to see it and understand it, and that’s what that work was all about.”

Cortez Masto said that she and Murkowski sent a letter to the administration asking why the report was taken down. The White House responded it was taken down in compliance with the executive order, which Cortez Masto’s office specified was the “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” order issued on Jan. 20. Cortez Masto said she’s received no other information from the administration or an explanation on why it sees this report as a DEI issue.

The White House did not answer NOTUS’ question about whether or not it believes issues regarding missing and murdered Native Americans qualify as “DEI” issues and directed NOTUS to the DOJ. A DOJ spokesperson told NOTUS in a statement that the “report was removed to ensure compliance with OPM guidance regarding President Trump’s Executive Order Defending Women. The Commission’s report is still available on numerous external websites.”

The spokesperson added that the “joint DOJ/DOI response continues to be posted on the DOJ’s Tribal Justice and Safety website,” and included this link to a page of “archived content” that does not include the report itself. The DOJ did not answer NOTUS’ questions about whether it intends to restore the report.

The Wayback Machine shows a PDF of the report was last available on Feb. 8. A “Page not found” message appears in its place on Feb. 9. An error message was still present on that page as of Nov. 13.

When NOTUS asked Cortez Masto why she thinks the administration has kept the report off the DOJ’s website, she said: “They think they’re a race. They are ignorant to the fact of the trust and treaty obligation that we have to our tribal communities.”

“They don’t really care about addressing the violent crime in our tribal communities and Indigenous communities, and that has been very clear to me based on their reaction to the bipartisan letter from both [Murkowski] and I, to the comments that I get in the hearings when [nominees are] before me,” she continued.

Smith also described the administration’s re-classification of Native American nations from sovereign states to groups subjected to DEI.

“The Trump administration continually, and seems to me, purposefully, misunderstands the difference between Native people and tribal nations and other important and big groups in this country,” Smith said. “Tribal nations are not just another constituency. They’re sovereign nations, sovereign people, and it’s just so offensive to see that the administration isn’t interested in understanding what’s causing this epidemic of violence and what we should do about it.”

Cortez Masto said she wanted to “make it very clear to this administration” that this is not a DEI issue, and that the recommendations in the report will still continue to inspire more of her legislation.

“They can try to keep it off of the website, but the report’s there.
The recommendations are there. The commission, I’m assuming, is still happening, and we’re still going to move forward to address it,” she said.