Trump Admin Asks Supreme Court to Unblock Birthright Citizenship Order

Three preliminary injunctions have been issued on Trump’s birthright citizenship restrictions.

The U.S. Supreme Court in Washington on Feb. 10, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to intervene and at least partially roll back multiple preliminary injunctions courts have issued against his executive order to restrict birthright citizenship.

In a brief filed on March 13, Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris told Chief Justice John Roberts that courts had gone too far in issuing nationwide injunctions. The Supreme Court, she said, should limit two of the injunctions—from Washington state and Maryland—to the order’s effect on particular plaintiffs. Another from Massachusetts should be stayed in full, she said.

Harris also asked the court to stay the injunctions in a way that would allow executive agencies to develop and issue guidance explaining how they would implement Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship.

The birthright citizenship lawsuits are among the more than 90 lodged against the administration, as well as among the many to result in court orders that blocked the administration’s actions. In many of these lawsuits, the administration has argued that the plaintiffs lacked standing or were requesting injunctions with relief that was too broad in its scope.

Harris’s brief took aim at the practice of issuing nationwide injunctions and suggested the Supreme Court should intervene to stop purported abuses among lower courts.

“This court should declare that enough is enough before district courts’ burgeoning reliance on universal injunctions becomes further entrenched,” her brief reads. She added that “only this court’s intervention can prevent universal injunctions from becoming universally acceptable.”

Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, signed on Jan. 20, argued that an individual born in the United States is not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” if that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the country and the individual’s father was not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of his or her birth.

It further stated that the privilege of U.S. citizenship does not apply to an individual whose mother’s presence was lawful but temporary and whose father was neither a citizen nor a lawful permanent resident at the time of that individual’s birth.

The order prompted debate over the meaning of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause, which states: “All 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.”

Critics of the order have cited the Supreme Court’s 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, wherein the court held that the 14th Amendment granted birthright citizenship to a Chinese man whose parents were legally present in the United States. Quoting the decision, Harris said in her brief that Wong Kim Ark only applied to children whose parents were permanently domiciled in the United States.

In Maryland, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman said the case “forecloses the President’s interpretation of the Citizenship Clause” and that Trump’s interpretation “contradicts the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment.” She also described the nationwide scope of her injunction as appropriate. The nationwide scope, she said, was “necessary because the policy concerns citizenship—a national concern that demands a uniform policy.

Correction: A previous version of this article misidentified the injunction from Massachusetts, which should be stayed in full, according to the acting solicitor general. The Epoch Times regrets the error.