Lawyers for President Trump asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to lift a nationwide pause imposed on the president’s order ending birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants.
The move represents the first time the legal wrangling over the president’s order to end birthright citizenship has reached the Supreme Court. If the Trump administration succeeds, the policy could go into effect in some parts of the country.
Three federal courts, in Massachusetts, Maryland and Washington State, had issued directives temporarily pausing the order, which was signed by Mr. Trump on his first day in office and declared that the government would no longer consider the U.S.-born children of undocumented people as citizens.
The Trump administration’s emergency applications are aimed at pushing back on nationwide injunctions, judicial orders that can block a policy or action from being enforced throughout the entire country, rather than just on those parties involved in the litigation. The tool has been used by both Democratic and Republican administrations, and a debate over such injunctions has simmered for years.
In her applications to the court, Sarah M. Harris, the acting solicitor general, called the government’s request a “modest” one to limit the pause to “parties actually within the courts’ power.”
“Universal injunctions have reached epidemic proportions since the start of the current administration,” Ms. Harris wrote.
The three emergency applications list 22 states and the District of Columbia as parties to the lawsuits.
A series of Mr. Trump’s initial policy moves have been blocked nationally by judges who have imposed similar broad injunctions while suits challenging their legality are considered.
It is not clear whether the justices will agree to take up the case as an emergency matter. Even if they reject the Trump administration’s emergency requests, the court could decide to take up the dispute and weigh in on the more central question of whether birthright citizenship is guaranteed in the Constitution once the lawsuits have made their way through the appeals courts.
Birthright citizenship has long been considered a foundational principle of the United States. The 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are Americans. In the landmark 1898 case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court affirmed the guarantee of automatic citizenship for nearly all children born in the country. Since then, courts have upheld that expansive understanding of birthright citizenship.
But a small group of legal scholars, including John Eastman, a lawyer who is known for drafting the plan to block certification of the 2020 election, has pushed for a reinterpretation of the Wong Kim Ark case. Mr. Trump and his allies argue that the 14th Amendment should never have been interpreted to give citizenship to everyone born in the country. They point to a phrase in the 14th Amendment that limits birthright citizenship to those “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.
So far, that argument has not fared well in the courts. A federal judge in Seattle called Mr. Trump’s executive order “blatantly unconstitutional.”
In its ruling, a panel of appellate court judges for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which included one Trump appointee, along with one judge appointed by Jimmy Carter and one by George W. Bush, announced the court would hear arguments in the case in June.
