Trump administration asks Supreme Court to partly allow birthright citizenship restrictions

Attorneys for the Trump administration are pleading with the Supreme Court to halt three lower court injunctions scuttling the president’s executive order to effectively end birthright citizenship. 

In a series of emergency filings on Thursday, the Trump administration argued that lower courts exceeded their powers by imposing overly broad injunctions on his order to claw back the longstanding US policy of granting citizenship to people born in the country. 

“Universal injunctions have reached epidemic proportions since the start of the current Administration,” the lawyers wrote in the filing. “Members of this Court have long recognized the need to settle the lawfulness of universal injunctions.”

“At a minimum, this Court should stay all three pre-liminary injunctions to the extent they prohibit executive agencies from developing and issuing guidance explaining how they would implement the Citizenship Order in the event that it takes effect.”

Judges in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Washington State had imposed injunctions blocking President Trump from carrying out his executive order to end birthright citizenship while legal challenges against the order play out. A coalition of 22 states, seven plaintiffs, and two immigration groups challenged Trump’s executive order. 

Three federal appeals courts later slapped down requests from the Trump administration to intervene against those injunctions. 

“The government comes to this Court with a ‘modest’ request: while the parties litigate weighty merits questions, the Court should ‘restrict the scope’ of multiple preliminary injunctions that ‘purpor[t] to cover every person in the country,’ limiting those injunctions to parties actually within the courts’ power,” Acting US Solicitor General Sarah Harris explained in the plea to the Supreme Court. 

So far, no lower court has backed Trump in upholding the legality of his Jan. 20 executive order to scrap birthright citizenship for individuals born after Feb. 19 to illegal immigrants. The order also restricts federal agencies from accepting or acknowledging the US citizenship of those children. 

Trump is banking on a novel legal theory to argue that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship guarantee to individuals “born or naturalized in the United States” does not apply to the brood of illegal immigrants.

The theory is that the 14th Amendment phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” means that the individuals have to be Americans and that illegal immigrants are subject to the jurisdiction of their country.  

During his first administration, Trump had railed against birthright citizenship but stopped short of mounting a legal challenge against it amid fears from lawyers that the effort wouldn’t be successful. But years later, the Supreme Court is comprised of six conservative appointed justices and the president is seemingly optimistic about its chances. 

Birthright citizenship had been the judicial branch’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment for over 150 years. In 1898, the Supreme Court backed up that interpretation of the 14th Amendment. 

The Supreme Court is expected to establish a briefing schedule on the matter within the coming days. There are at least 30 other countries that recognize birthright citizenship. 

This marks the first time that Trump’s challenge against birthright citizenship has reached the Supreme Court.