South Dakota Sioux tribe says it won't remove coronavirus checkpoints at request of governor

In order to monitor and track the coronavirus, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in South Dakota set up checkpoints, and the tribe's chairman, Harold Frazier, told CNN on Sunday the tribe must keep them up as they are the "best tool we have right now" to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

"We want to ensure that people coming from hot spots or highly infected areas, we ask them to go around our land," Frazier said. The reservation is home to 12,000 people, and there is only one eight-bed medical facility with no intensive care unit. Frazier said the nearest critical care facility is three hours away, and the checkpoints are due to "the lack of resources we have medically."

Last week, Gov. Kristi Noem (R) said the checkpoints need to come down, and her policy director sent a letter to the tribe on Friday saying they are illegal and "interfere with regulating traffic on U.S. and state highways." Noem dismissed quarantine measures in the earlier days of the coronavirus pandemic, and the state was soon home to a huge coronavirus cluster, with hundreds of workers at one pork processing plant becoming infected.

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