When the Supreme Court hears arguments Thursday over President Trump’s challenge to automatic birthright citizenship, the immigration spat could take a backseat to a more contested legal question about the power of lower-court judges to rein in the executive branch.
Earlier this year, lower courts in Washington, Massachusetts and Maryland slapped broad universal injunctions — nationwide pauses — that stopped Trump’s executive action to end birthright citizenship from taking effect.
Back in March, the Trump administration pleaded with the high court and is hoping to use the birthright citizenship case to end “toxic and unprecedented” universal injunctions that have hampered a myriad of the president’s executive actions.
“This is a funny test case, because the underlying law is so clear and because it’s sort of the same exact issue all across the country,” Gabriel Chin, a Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, and Director of Clinical Legal Education at the UC Davis School of Law, told The Post.
“I’m actually a little surprised that the Supreme Court took it.”
Many legal scholars, including Chin, believe the underlying merits of the Trump administration’s challenge against birthright citizenship are on shaky grounds because of the clear text of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.”
A key objective behind the drafting of the 14th Amendment was to ensure that freed slaves obtained citizenship.
The Supreme Court previously backed the birthright citizenship interpretation in 1898.
“The case against the executive order or in favor of universal birthright citizenship is extraordinarily strong from the text of the Constitution, which is clear, to the framers intent,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.
She warned that if birthright citizenship gets overturned, it could have a significant impact on the roughly 3.6 million Americans having babies each year, who may have to prove their children’s lineage and citizenship status.
A group of 22 states, seven plaintiffs, and two immigration organizations had sued over Trump’s actions on birthright citizenship.
Three appeals courts shot down the administration’s attempts to reverse the injunctions.
While justices on the Supreme Court haven’t spoken much about birthright citizenship, many of them from all ideological corners of the bench have raised concerns about nationwide injunctions.
During Trump’s first term, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas suggested in a concurring opinion on the president’s travel ban that the high court may need to reevaluate lower court use of nationwide injunctions.
Fellow conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch argued in a different case that “routine issuance of universal injunctions is patently unworkable.”
Liberal Justice Elena Kagan publicly said in a 2022 university speech that “It just can’t be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks and leave it stopped for the years that it takes to go through the normal process.”
Her liberal peer, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested in an opinion last year that the high court needs to look into universal injunctions but cautioned the solution wasn’t “straightforward.” --->READ MORE HERE
The Supreme Court on Thursday weighed whether to allow President Donald Trump’s restrictions on birthright citizenship to temporarily take effect in most of the country, even if they might ultimately be found to violate the Constitution.
The justices heard arguments in the Trump administration’s emergency appeals over lower court orders that have kept the citizenship restrictions on hold across the country. Nationwide, or universal, injunctions have emerged as an important check on Trump’s efforts to remake the government and a mounting frustration to the Republican president and his allies.
Judges have issued 40 nationwide injunctions since Trump began his second term in January, Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court at the start of more than two hours of arguments.
Birthright citizenship is among several issues, many related to immigration, that the administration has asked the court to address on an emergency basis, after lower courts acted to slow the president’s agenda.
The justices are also considering the Trump administration’s pleas to end humanitarian parole for more than 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela and to strip other temporary legal protections from another 350,000 Venezuelans. The administration remains locked in legal battles over its efforts to swiftly deport people accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador under an 18th century wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act.
Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his second term that would deny citizenship to children who are born to people who are in the country illegally or temporarily.
The order conflicts with a Supreme Court decision from 1898 that held that the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment made citizens of all children born on U.S. with narrow exceptions that are not at issue in this case.
States, immigrants and rights group sued almost immediately, and lower courts quickly barred enforcement of the order while the lawsuits proceed.
The current fight is over the rules that apply while the lawsuits go forward.
The court’s liberal justices seemed firmly in support of the lower court rulings that found the changes to citizenship that Trump wants to make would upset the settled understanding of birthright citizenship that has existed for more than 125 years. --->READ MORE HERE
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