On April 1, 2026, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments regarding the constitutionality of birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara. The case is derivative of a whimsical legal argument concocted by an administration that ignores the Constitution on a daily basis. President Trump’s Executive Order No. 14160, issued nearly the minute he was sworn back into office, aims to place restrictions on birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to parents who were present in the country temporarily or without lawful status. Because of the specific language of the Fourteenth Amendment, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer sought to convince the court that the legal meaning of “jurisdiction,” the power and ability to enforce one’s legal authority over a territory, can be semantically equated with “domicile,” or a permanent place of residence.

While SCOTUS ruled 5-4 against ending birthright citizenship on June 30, 2026, the current presidential administration has prioritized re-constructing the meaning of U.S. nationhood through the ideological, legal, and corporeal enactment of a modernized version of “Indian Removal.” As implied in my JER article “The Other Cherokee Removal,” the broader implementation of “removal actions” such as dislocation, expulsion, and deportation aim to remove undesired minority groups, in a physical sense, from the nation, which helps define and affirm the limits of citizenship and landownership within the settler state. During the late 1830s, this hyper-racialized process quickly occurred within the context of the vast instability of the Republic of Texas’s claims to nationhood. The threat of Mexican re-invasion caused Anglo Texans to label some non-white residents with property claims, such as the Texas Cherokees, as co-conspirators in a plot to overthrow the republic. Within this context, Anglo Texans created a hardened boundary between legal and illegal residency; the Texas Cherokees’ racial identity determined their illegal alien status which, in turn, led to their expulsion from Texas and deportation to the United States (or more appropriately “Indian Territory”).

Interior of the now-slated to close “Alligator Alcatraz,” with President Donald Trump in the background. Image taken July 1, 2025. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.Ideologically, Trump administrative officials and media surrogates advocating for stricter immigration policies have adopted a renewed version of Nativism, which provides the justification for the enactment of removal policies targeting minority groups. The “new nativist” exclusionary, white ethno-nationalist emphasis on prioritizing the interests of “native-born” Americans is derivative of the contradictory nature of U.S. settler-colonial ideology; by claiming “native” status, they reinforce the systematic land appropriation and erasure of indigeneity on territory once owned by Native Americans. Since launching his first presidential campaign in 2015, Trump has blamed immigrants for the ills of the country, especially criminality and the shortage of job opportunities, and has claimed that non-citizens illegally vote in elections and are a drain on the social welfare system.

Both Vice President J. D. Vance and Trump have implied that undocumented immigrants are also at fault for taking housing opportunities from native-born Americans. Vance has attributed national housing shortages and skyrocketing housing prices to the flood of immigrants “who have no legal right to be here” acquiring property and/or competing “against young American families for homes.” Such xenophobia surrounding housing stands out because of its explicit ties to a hallmark of settler-colonial ideology: physical permanency on the land through residency and property ownership. Rhetorically, then, the current administration has suggested that the current housing crisis is due to the overwhelming presence of illegal immigrants that have zero claim to permanency within the nation–state.

The Trump administration’s policies reflect upon the concerted effort to devise a hardened boundary between legal residency, permanency, and citizenship, and illegal residency and non-citizenship (or statelessness). For mainly marginalized, non-white immigrants, the administration is simultaneously making it harder to obtain legal status and/or citizenship, and revoke the citizenship of former immigrants through denaturalization. Asylum requests, mainly from countries with non-white majority populations, has been virtually halted. Since January 2025, some two-hundred–and-sixty DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipients have been detained by ICE (Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and more than eighty have been deported. The hypothetical legal goal then, it seems, is to make sure that most immigrants—past, present, and future—either retain their illegal alien status, lose their protection status, or are even stripped of their U.S. citizenship. Because of the broader failure to construct the majority of a physical perimeter wall between Mexico and the United States during his first presidential term, E.O. 14160—an effort to place restrictions on birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants and temporary visitors—is part of this multi-pronged effort by Trump’s administration to erect a legal wall around the parameters for political belonging in the United States.

The state-sponsored, institutional enforcement of the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants is conducted by ICE. In a recent testimony before the Illinois Accountability Commission, Garrett M. Graff—an expert on the history and current operations of the Department of Homeland Security—argued that America’s immigration apparatus, which was institutionalized after 9/11, has transformed into a paramilitary force. Recent ICE operations in Minneapolis (Operation Metro Surge) exposed the reality that these expulsions are violent events. More than that, illegal incarceration is a common feature of ICE operations that discriminately target non-white peoples. The “new removal” resonates deeply among Indigenous communities in Minnesota—many of whom joined in the active resistance to ICE operations in and around Minneapolis—because their ancestors suffered (in addition to genocidal events) through similarly traumatic mass round-ups and incarceration before ultimately being expelled from their homelands and forced onto reservations.

ICE agents in Minneapolis face off against protestors in the wake of a shooting of Renee Good, January 7, 2026. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In its own milieu, the current U.S. federal administration has re-constructed the meaning of settler nationhood through the unabashed embracement of an exclusionary concept of national political belonging that conflates the relationship between race, property, and citizenship. By pushing a rhetoric that mythologizes the foundational inception of the United States as an ethnocentric nation of “native-born” citizens, the administration has taken a sledgehammer to the complex and contested history of the American past; erasing the idea that the United States is a settler nation–state and that millions of emigrants, both free and unfree, arrived across time and space on Indigenous homelands. The realization of such a conception of nationhood largely depends on changing, bending, or even breaking federal laws, and by adopting immigration policies that harken back to earlier eras of Native removals. Casting most immigrants as non-permanent, illegal residents galvanizes state-sponsored, paramilitary-led efforts to dislocate, incarcerate, and expel a heavily non-white population from the boundaries of the nation–state.