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The move to terminate the tribe’s reservation status makes its roughly 2,600 members more vulnerable to the novel coronavirus, warned Kevin Allis, head of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), the oldest and largest tribal umbrella group.

The deadly respiratory disease, which emerged in China late last year, has infected about 250,000 people in the United States and killed about 6,500, according to a Reuters tally.

The U.S. government’s decision comes “at a time when tribal governments are desperately working to protect the health of their citizens and the economic security of their communities,” Allis said in a statement.

“They shouldn’t also have to contend with attacks on their tribal homelands from the very trustee that is legally obligated to protect those homelands,” he added, with Cromwell calling the move a “sneak attack in the midst of a pandemic.”

Cases of the coronavirus have been confirmed among indigenous people in Colombia, Brazil and Malaysia, fanning fears of a rapid spread among communities with little immunity to diseases and limited healthcare access.

The Department of Interior said that the Mashpee Wampanoag “remains a federally recognized tribe.”

“This decision does not affect the federal recognition status of the tribe, only Interior’s statutory authority to accept the land in trust,” it said in a statement this week.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs did not respond to a request for comment.