U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments on Trump with birthright case

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Thursday in a case involving birthright citizenship that could sharply curb the judiciary's ability to rein in Donald Trump and future American presidents.

The case before the top court involved the Republican leader's bid to end automatic citizenship for children born on American soil.

But the immediate question at hand was whether a single federal judge can block a president's policies with an injunction that applies nationwide.

Both conservative and liberal justices expressed concerns during oral arguments about the increasing use of nationwide injunctions by district courts, but appeared divided -- not necessarily along ideological lines -- about how to tackle the issue.

Arguments had been scheduled for an hour but went on for more than two and barely touched on the legality of Trump's executive order ending birthright citizenship, which has been paused separately by district courts in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington state that deemed it unconstitutional.

Other Trump initiatives have also been frozen by judges around the nation -- both Democratic and Republican appointees -- leading the Justice Department to make an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, where conservatives make up a 6-3 majority.

The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to restrict the application of a district court's injunction solely to the parties who brought the case and the district where the judge presides.

Arguing before the court, Solicitor General John Sauer compared nationwide injunctions to a "nuclear weapon," saying they hamstring the president and "disrupt the Constitution's careful balancing of the separation of powers."

"Courts grant relief to the people who sue in front of them," Sauer said. "So the notion that relief has to be given to the whole world because others who have not taken the time to sue are not before the courts results in all these problems."

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the three liberals on the court, pushed back.

"Your argument seems to turn our justice system, in my view at least, into a 'catch me if you can' kind of regime," Jackson said, "where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people's rights.

"And I don't understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law."

Sauer responded that Jackson's "'catch me if you can' problem operates in the opposite direction, where we have the government racing from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, having to sort of clear the table in order to implement a new policy."

Past presidents have also complained about national injunctions shackling their agenda, but such orders have sharply risen under Trump and his administration has seen more in two months than Democrat Joe Biden did during his first three years in office.

Jeremy Feigenbaum, the solicitor general of New Jersey, one of 23 states which have filed suits against Trump's bid to end birthright citizenship, acknowledged there are problems with universal injunctions but said there is "an extraordinary basis for this one."

Allowing separate court rulings on the birthright issue in different states would lead to "chaos on the ground where people's citizenship turns on and off when you cross state lines," Feigenbaum said.

Trump, in a post on Truth Social, urged the court to rule in his favor.

"Birthright Citizenship was not meant for people taking vacations to become permanent Citizens of the United States of America, and bringing their families with them, all the time laughing at the 'SUCKERS' that we are!" he said.

Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office decreeing that children born to parents in the United States illegally or on temporary visas would not automatically become U.S. citizens.

The three lower courts ruled that to be a violation of the 14th Amendment, which states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States."

Sauer, during Thursday's arguments, said Trump's order "reflects the original meaning of the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed citizenship to the children of former slaves, not to illegal aliens or temporary visitors."

The Supreme Court rejected such a narrow definition in a landmark 1898 case.

Whatever the justices decide on nationwide injunctions, the actual question of whether Trump can legally end birthright citizenship is expected to be back in front of the top court before long.

© 2025 AFP