On 21 January 2025 President Trump signed the executive order Protecting the American People Against Invasion. It instructs the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to “faithfully execute” immigration law with “maximum dispatch.” The same day DHS broadened “expedited removal,” allowing line officers to summarily eject non‑citizens found anywhere in the country who cannot prove two years of lawful presence — without a hearing before an immigration judge.​The White HouseNILC

Administrative Mechanics

Expedited removal is not new, but prior administrations confined it to recent arrivals near the border. DHS’s January memorandum eliminates that geographic limit, collapsing procedure into a field‑level interview that may last minutes and yields no transcript. Legal redress is available only after the fact and almost always from outside the United States.​American Immigration Council

Two months later the administration attempted to extend the shortcut further, authorizing deportations to “safe third countries” even when asylum claims were pending. A federal district court blocked the rule; the injunction remains in force.​Reuters

The Citizen Dragnet

Mistakes were inevitable. In early April The Washington Post and independent researchers documented at least seven U.S. citizens detained or deported under the new protocols. ICE databases had flagged them as removable; field agents acted first and verified later.​The Washington PostWOLA

Last week the Fourth Circuit confronted the administration’s refusal to repatriate Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident wrongfully removed to El Salvador. Judge Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee, called the government’s stance “an erosion of the rule of law” and ordered it to “make what was wrong, right.”​Time

Civil‑society monitors report additional citizens in long‑term ICE custody. Because expedited removal records are sealed, the full count is unknowable, but one statistical model places the citizen share of deportees at roughly 1.5 percent — thousands of people since 2007 and rising.​Truthout

Historical Parallel

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 gave President Andrew Jackson statutory cover to exchange tribal homelands for land west of the Mississippi. Removal orders were executed by local agents with minimal judicial oversight; when tribes sued, the Executive ignored adverse Supreme Court rulings. The result was the Trail of Tears and at least 4,000 Cherokee deaths.​Office of the HistorianResearch Guides

Both policies—then and now—substitute administrative fiat for individualized adjudication. Both rely on speed, distance, and opacity to defeat legal claims. And both redefine who counts as a member of the political community: Native nations in the 1830s; naturalized citizens, mixed‑status families, and—as data now indicate—some birthright citizens in 2025.

Legal Convergences

1830 Removal Act	2025 Expedited Removal Expansion
Authority: Statute delegates broad discretion to the President.	Authority: INA § 235(b)(1) lets DHS summarily remove enumerated classes; Trump order widens those classes.
Process: Army officers conduct “treaty councils” and immediate relocations. Courts functionally excluded.	Process: CBP/ICE officers conduct interviews; no transcript, no attorney. Review only via habeas after deportation.
Affected population: Sovereign tribes forcibly re‑classified as subjects.	Affected population: Non‑citizens, parolees, TPS holders, and documented cases of U.S. citizens.
Judicial response: Worcester v. Georgia ignored by Executive.	Multiple district and appellate injunctions; compliance contested.

Political Calculus

In 1830 removal solved a political problem: opening cotton acreage to white settlers. In 2025 expedited removal solves a political timetable: demonstrating border “control” before mid‑term filing deadlines. Both sets of actors framed the policy as national security, both dismissed collateral human loss as an acceptable cost, and both exploited populations with limited franchise to contest state power.

Constitutional Stakes

The Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” applies to citizens and non‑citizens alike. When the Executive designs a procedure precisely to avoid an independent decision‑maker, it hollows that guarantee to a formality. Courts can issue writs—as they did for Abrego Garcia—but enforcement still depends on the same branch that chose to ignore due process in the first place.

The Bleak Point

The Indian Removal Act teaches that once a government perfects a tool for discarding inconvenient communities, later generations will find new uses for it. The 2025 deportation architecture is faster, cheaper, and algorithmically amplified; it is already sweeping citizens into exile. The question is no longer whether the policy violates rights in theory. It is whether those harmed have any practical chance to be heard before they are gone.

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Unless Congress reinscribes the primacy of hearings over heuristics, expedited removal will stand as the twenty‑first‑century analogue to Removal in the nineteenth: a procedurally lawful engine of unlawful exile.