Tribal advocates call for improvements in California’s Feather Alert system
Tribal leaders and Indigenous advocates called for improvements to California’s Feather Alert emergency notification system during an Assembly hearing on Native American affairs Wednesday.
A Feather Alert is issued under specific circumstances when an Indigenous person is in danger under unexplainable or suspicious circumstances. The system was launched in January 2023.
A 2025 U.S. Department of Justice report found that California had the sixth-highest number of Native American missing persons cases.
But a 2025 report from the Bureau of Indian Affairs puts that number much higher, but takes into account missing and murdered cases. The BIA estimates that more than 4,200 missing and murdered cases remain unsolved.
After a slow start, the system has seen improvements in recent years. But some members of the Indigenous community said the Feather Alert is still hitting roadblocks, especially with Indigenous children in foster care. The process to activate an alert with a Native foster child can wind up delayed because the child is in the custody of the state and their respective county, said Kimberly Clough, legal director of the California Tribal Families Coalition. Families can also face issues of delayed response due to jurisdictional confusion, a lack of communication and misidentification, Clough said.
Morning Star Gali, a member of the Pit River Tribe, said she experienced this while trying to help a family activate a Feather Alert for a missing 14-year-old.
Gali, who is the executive director of Sacramento-based grassroot organization Indigenous Justice, works directly with families whose relatives go missing.
Gali said to activate the Feather Alert, the teen’s family had to reach out to a social worker, the teen’s attorney, and a tribal Indian Child Welfare Act social worker. The teen was missing for more than five months. Gali said the child has gone missing again, and another report is in the works.
Around 53% of missing Indigenous children disappear from a foster home, according to the Congressional Research Service.
“When a child goes missing, who rallies around? Who raises the voice? Who creates visibility, it’s their family, it’s their community,” Clough said. “But if the county or the state is that child’s community, they refuse to raise a voice.”
The Feather Alert system got off to a slow start. In its first year, only one alert was sent out. Tribes said they had alert requests rejected, struggled working with law enforcement and saw delayed response times.
In 2024, Assemblymember James Ramos, D-Highland, authored two bills to improve the system. One required law enforcement to respond to a Feather Alert request within 48 hours. The other allowed tribes to work directly with the California Highway Patrol, the agency responsible for reviewing alert requests. The amendment also required CHP to tell a tribe why a request to issue an alert was rejected.
Since then, the Feather Alert has been used more frequently, according to CHP commissioner Sean Duryee. In 2025, 45 alerts were issued across the state. This year, he said 15 alerts have been requested and issued. On average, it takes a “couple hours,” Duryee said, to activate an alert.
Outside the Capitol on Wednesday, Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper and Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho joined Wilton Rancheria Chairman Jesus Tarango, other law enforcement agencies and Native tribes to announce the expansion of a Missing and Murdered Indigenous People task force.
