WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is hearing its first set of Trump-related arguments in the second Trump presidency. The case stems from the executive order President Donald Trump issued on his first day in office that would deny citizenship to children born on U.S. soil to parents who are in the country illegally or temporarily. The executive order marks a major change to the provision of the 14th Amendment that grants citizenship to people born in the United States, with just a couple of exceptions.
Click here to listen to the oral argument that begins just after 9a.m. CDT
Immigrants, rights groups and states sued almost immediately to challenge the executive order. Federal judges have uniformly cast doubt on Trump’s reading of the Citizenship Clause. Three judges have blocked the order from taking effect anywhere in the U.S., including U.S. District Judge John Coughenour. “I’ve been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” Coughenour said at a hearing in his Seattle courtroom.
The Supreme Court is taking up emergency appeals filed by the Trump administration asking to be able to enforce the executive order in most of the country, at least while lawsuits over the order proceed. The constitutionality of the order is not before the court just yet. Instead, the justices are looking at potentially limiting the authority of individual judges to issue rulings that apply throughout the United States. These are known as nationwide, or universal, injunctions.
Trump's Solicitor General wraps up his opening and his challenger steps up
Justice Kavanaugh pressed Sauer with a series of questions about exactly how the federal government might enforce Trump’s order.
“What do hospitals do with a newborn? What do states do with a newborn?” he said. Sauer said they wouldn’t necessarily do anything different, but the government might figure out ways to reject documentation with “the wrong designation of citizenship.”
Kavanaugh continued to press for clearer answers, pointing out that the executive order only gave the government about 30 days to develop a policy. “You think they can get it together in time?” he said.
Justice Brown Jackson appeared deeply skeptical of Sauer's argument.
“Your argument seems to turn our justice system, in my view at least, into a catch me if you can kind of regime … where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights,” she said to Sauer.
New Jersey Solicitor General Jeremy Feigenbaum stepped up to make his case after justices peppered Sauer with questions. He is arguing on behalf of the states that say they’ll lose millions of dollars in benefits available to U.S. children and also have to overhaul identification systems. Feigenbaum asserted in his opening that the “post-Civil War nation wrote into our Constitution that citizens of the United States and of the States would be one and the same without variation across state lines.”
Feigenbaum told the justices that judges should be able to issue orders that affect the whole country, but only in narrow circumstances. Roberts jumps on that last point, asking him to elaborate on why they should only be used sparingly — a question that could be a clue as to how the chief justice is thinking about the issue.
Justices try to pin down Solicitor Sauer's argument
Justice Kagan cut to the heart of the case by asking Sauer that, if the court concludes Trump’s order is illegal, how the nation’s highest court could strike down the measure under the administration’s theory of courts’ limited power.
“Does every single person who is affected by this EO have to bring their own suit?” Kagan asked. “How long does it take?”
Sauer tried to answer, but several of Kagan’s colleagues, along with the justice, jumped in to say they didn’t hear a clear way the court could swiftly ensure the government could not take unconstitutional action. Roberts tried to help by jumping in to note the high court has moved fast in the past, concluding the TikTok case in one month.
“General Sauer, are you really going to answer Kagan by saying there is no way to do this expeditiously?” Coney Barrett asks Sauer.
She pressed Sauer to say whether a class-action lawsuit could be another way for judges to issue a court order that could affect more people. He said the administration would likely push back on efforts of people to bind together for a class-action lawsuit, but that it would be another way for cases to move forward.
Justice Alito pointed out that multiple states have also sued over the birthright citizenship order and won broader victories. The Trump administration is also arguing that states shouldn’t have been able to do that, but Sauer sticks to his point about the nationwide injunctions, saying they yield “all these sort of pathologies.”
Sotomayor returned how Trump’s order could affect people, saying it for some babies it could “render them stateless.”
Justices pepper Trump's Solicitor General with questions in oral arguments
Arguing first is D. John Sauer, the solicitor general and the government’s top attorney before the Supreme Court. Sauer also served as a personal lawyer for Trump as he fought election interference charges filed in 2023. Before that, Sauer served as Missouri’s solicitor general and a clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
Sauer began by taking aim at decisions from lower courts that apply nationwide. He argued that they go beyond the courts’ authority and allow people who want to file lawsuits to go “judge shopping” for those they expect to agree. The decisions are often rushed, he said.
“This is a bipartisan problem that has now spanned the last five presidential administration,” he said.
Nationwide injunctions have become especially frustrating for the Trump administration, as opponents of the president’s policies file hundreds of lawsuits challenging his flurry of executive orders.
After a series of questions from Justices Brown Jackson and Coney Barrett about the possible implications of nationwide court orders more generally, Justice Gorsuch raised another question about birthright citizenship in particular: “What do you say to the suggestion in this case those patchwork problems for the government as well as for the plaintiffs justify broader relief?”
Sauer responded that it is a problem for the executive branch to deal with.
The court issued an opinion unrelated to birthright citizenship
The Supreme Court has revived a civil rights lawsuit against a Texas police officer who fatally shot a man during a traffic stop over unpaid tolls. The justices Thursday ordered the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to take a new look at the case of Ashtian Barnes, who died in his rental car in 2016 on the shoulder of the Sam Houston Tollway. Barnes was shot by Officer Roberto Felix Jr., who jumped on the sill of the driver’s door of Barnes’ car as it began to pull away from the stop. Felix’s lawyers say he fired twice in two seconds because he “reasonably feared for his life.”
Trump presses for restrictions ahead of arguments
President Donald Trump is weighing in ahead of arguments in the birthright citizenship case today.
Trump says in an online post that granting citizenship to people born here, long seen as a constitutional promise, makes the country look “STUPID” and like “SUCKERS.” He incorrectly asserted the U.S. is the only country in the world with birthright citizenship. While not every country grants it, about 30 other countries do, including Canada.
His executive order at the heart of today’s case aims to end birthright citizenship for children born to people in the U.S. illegally, something many legal scholars say would require amending the Constitution.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is hearing arguments Thursday in its first case stemming from the blitz of actions that have marked the start of President Donald Trump's second term.
Click here to listen to the oral argument that begins just after 9a.m. CDT
Before the court are the Trump administration's emergency appeals of lower court orders putting nationwide holds on the Republican president's push to deny citizenship to children born to people who are in the United States illegally.
Birthright citizenship is among several issues, many related to immigration, that the administration has asked the court to address on an emergency basis, after lower courts acted to slow the president's agenda.
The justices are also considering the administration's pleas to end humanitarian parole for more than 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela and to strip other temporary legal protections from another 350,000 Venezuelans. The administration remains locked in legal battles over its efforts to swiftly deport people accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador under an 18th century wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act.
In Thursday's arguments, the justices will be weighing whether judges have the authority to issue what are called nationwide, or universal, injunctions. The Trump administration, like the Biden administration before it, has complained that judges are overreaching by issuing orders that apply to everyone instead of just the parties before the court.
Yet in discussing the limits of a judge's power, the court almost certainly will have to take up the change to citizenship that Trump wants to make, which would upset the settled understanding of birthright citizenship that has existed for more than 125 years.
What is birthright citizenship?
The first sentence of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution reads: “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.”
The Citizenship Clause, ratified in 1868 after the Civil War, was included to ensure that formerly enslaved people would be citizens. It effectively overturned the notorious Dred Scott decision, in which the Supreme Court held that Black people, no matter their status, were not citizens.
Since at least 1898 and the Supreme Court case of Wong Kim Ark, the provision has been widely interpreted to make citizens of everyone born on U.S. soil except for the children of diplomats, who have allegiance to another government; enemies present in the U.S. during hostile occupation; and, until a federal law changed things in 1924, sovereign Native American tribes.
Trump signed the birthright citizenship executive order on the first day of his second term
Trump's executive order would deny citizenship to children if neither parent is a citizen or lawful permanent resident. Those categories include people who are in the country illegally or temporarily because, the administration contends, they are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.
Almost immediately, states, immigrants and rights groups sued to block the executive order, accusing the Republican administration of trying to unsettle the understanding of birthright citizenship. Every court to consider the issue has sided with the challengers.
The court will not be making a final ruling on birthright citizenship
The administration is asking for the court orders to be reined in, not overturned entirely, and spends little time defending the executive order. The Justice Department argues that there has been an “explosion” in the number of nationwide injunctions issued since Trump retook the White House. The far-reaching court orders violate the law as well as long-standing views on a judge's authority, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote on behalf of the administration.
Courts typically deal only with the parties before them. Even class actions reach only the people who are part of a class certified by a judge, though those can affect millions of people, Sauer wrote.
Nationwide injunctions, by contrast, have no limits and can even include parties who oppose what the court orders are designed to protect, he wrote. As an example, Sauer pointed to Republican-led states that favor the administration's position but are subject to the nationwide injunctions.
But the justices may well ask about Trump's executive order and perhaps even tip their hand.
Lawyers for the states and immigrants argue that this is an odd issue for the court to use to limit judges' authority because courts have uniformly found that Trump's order likely violates the Constitution. Limiting the number of people who are protected by the rulings would create a confusing patchwork of rules in which new restrictions on citizenship could temporarily take effect in 27 states. That means a child born in a state that is challenging Trump's order would be a citizen, but a child born at the same time elsewhere would not, the lawyers said.
Arguments over emergency appeals are rare
The Supreme Court almost always takes up the underlying substance of a dispute, not an emergency appeal of court orders issued early in a legal case.
The main argument against the court deciding too much on the emergency, or shadow, docket is that the justices are intervening too early in the process, sometimes before lower courts have had much to say or the legal arguments are fully developed.
Last year, the justices heard arguments in emergency appeals, then blocked the Environmental Protection Agency’s air pollution-fighting “good neighbor” plan, which aimed to restrict smokestack emissions from power plants and other industrial sources that burden downwind areas with smog-causing pollution.
Two years earlier, the court delivered a split decision that allowed rules requiring COVID-19 vaccines for health care workers but not for employees of large companies.