The Supreme Court on Thursday scheduled a rare hearing for next month on the Trump administration’s bid to narrow nationwide injunctions against the president’s attempt to curb birthright citizenship protections.
The court typically concludes oral arguments in April each term, but Thursday’s order sets the rare hearing for May 15.
The administration had appealed to the Supreme Court on an emergency basis, seeking to narrow the nationwide scope of lower court rulings blocking birthright citizenship restrictions from taking effect while litigation about its legality moves forward.
“These cases — which involve challenges to the President’s January 20, 2025 Executive Order concerning birthright citizenship — raise important constitutional questions with major ramifications for securing the border,” the administration wrote. It said that “at this stage, 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.”
The administration in March filed nearly identical applications in three cases in which lower courts ruled against President Donald Trump: in Maryland, Washington state and Massachusetts.
The federal government under Trump has appealed to the justices in several cases, expressing frustration with lower court rulings against the government.
“This Court should declare that enough is enough before district courts’ burgeoning reliance on universal injunctions becomes further entrenched,” the administration wrote, adding that the justices “should stay the district courts’ preliminary injunctions except as to the individual plaintiffs and the identified members of the organizational plaintiffs (and, if the Court concludes that States are proper litigants, as to individuals who are born or reside in those States).” The government urged the court “at a minimum” to halt the injunctions “to the extent they prohibit agencies from developing and issuing public guidance regarding the implementation of the Order.”
One of the opposition filings to the government’s application, from the Maryland case, said there’s nothing “modest” about the government’s request, noting that birthright citizenship is “at the core of our Nation’s foundational precept that all people born on our soil are created equal, regardless of their parentage.” The opposition wrote that the universal injunction “preserves the uniformity of United States citizenship, an area in which nationwide consistency is vitally important” and that “chaos” would ensue if the court granted the motion.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
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