SCOTUSblog by Amy Howe 3/13/25
The Trump administration on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to allow it to enforce an executive order signed by President Donald Trump ending birthright citizenship – the guarantee of citizenship to virtually anyone born in the United States. In a trio of near-identical filings by Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris, the administration urged the justices to partially block preliminary injunctions, issued by federal district judges in Seattle, Maryland, and Massachusetts, that bar the government from implementing Trump’s executive order anywhere in the country.
Harris contended that the kind of nationwide (sometimes described as “universal”) injunctions issued in the three cases “transgress constitutional limits on courts’ powers” and “compromise the Executive Branch’s ability to carry out its functions.” “This Court,” she wrote, “should declare that enough is enough before district courts’ burgeoning reliance on universal injunctions becomes further entrenched.”
Harris instead urged the justices to strictly limit the district judges’ orders to block the enforcement of the order only to a much smaller group: the individual plaintiffs in the three cases, the specific members of the groups challenging the order who are identified in a complaint, and – if the court agrees that states have a legal right to challenge the order – residents of those states. At the very least, she added, the federal government should be able to take “internal steps to implement” the executive order while the litigation continues, even if it cannot enforce it.
Birthright citizenship was explicitly added to the Constitution in 1868 when the 14th Amendment was adopted following the Civil War. That amendment provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The United States is one of roughly 30 countries, including neighboring Canada and Mexico, that offer automatic citizenship to everyone born there.
Under Trump’s executive order, which was originally slated to go into effect 30 days after he signed it, children born in the United States are not automatically entitled to citizenship if their parents are in this country either illegally or temporarily.
In a hearing in late January, Senior U.S. District Judge John Coughenour of the Western District of Washington, a Ronald Reagan appointee, called the executive order “blatantly unconstitutional” and temporarily barred the government from implementing the order for 14 days. At a hearing on Feb. 6, Coughenour extended that ban, calling birthright citizenship a “fundamental constitutional right.”
More:
https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/03/trump-asks-supreme-court-to-step-in-on-birthright-citizenship/
