Donald Trump’s administration is taking the legal fight over birthright citizenship to the Supreme Court with a demand that justices limit the scope of multiple court rulings that have rejected his executive order that seeks to block children of certain immigrants from being citizens at birth.
Petitions to the nation’s high court on Thursday calls on the justices to limit three nationwide injunctions issued in courts across the country to apply only to the states that sued and won.
That move would allow the administration to begin implementing his executive order in other states, despite rulings from federal judges and appeals courts and arguments from legal scholars across the ideological spectrum that his attempt to unilaterally redefine the 14th Amendment is plainly unconstitutional.
Trump’s executive order would deny citizenship to children born in the United States if their parents are “unlawfully” present or have “lawful but temporary” status in the country.
A request to the Supreme Court from acting solicitor general Sarah Harris does not necessarily argue the merits of the challenges against the order but about the authority of courts to issue nationwide injunctions.
Federal judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington have issued overlapping nationwide injunctions following challenges from 22 states and immigrant advocacy groups, among others.
“Universal injunctions have reached epidemic proportions since the start of the current administration,” the filing says. “Those universal injunctions prohibit a Day 1 Executive Order from being enforced anywhere in the country, as to ‘hundreds of thousands’ of unspecified individuals who are ‘not before the court nor identified by the court.’”
The administration calls on the Supreme Court to limit those injunctions to states that are “actually within the courts’ power.”
Trump’s order, among the first signed by the president within his first hours in office, attempts to conditionally grant citizenship for children born in the United States. The 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause states that “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 Naturalization Act of 1790 applied citizenship only to “free white persons,” and the Supreme Court’s reviled decision in Dred Scott v Sandford in 1857 affirmed that citizenship could not be granted to Black people of African descent.
That decision was later rectified with the ratification of the 14th Amendment that ended slavery in America and established citizenship for freed Black Americans, as well as “all people born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
The Supreme Court upheld that principle in 1898, when it determined that Wong Kim Ark — who was born in San Francisco but denied entry into the United States because he was of Chinese descent — was a U.S. citizen.
In recent years, right-wing legal groups have elevated a once-fringe argument against the concept, which was featured in Project 2025’s guide for Trump’s immigration policy.
Groups like the Heritage Foundation and Claremont Institute have sought to argue that the word “jurisdiction” in the 14th Amendment means only a person’s political allegiance to the United States, and that the allegiance of children born to immigrant parents is to their parents’ home countries.
Following a lawsuit from group of 16 pregnant immigrant women whose children would be stateless under Trump’s order, Maryland District Judge Deborah L. Boardman said the order “runs counter to our nation’s 250-year history of citizenship by birth” and likely violates Supreme Court precedent, which “has resoundingly rejected” the president’s characterization of the 14th Amendment, Boardman said.
“In fact, no court in the country has ever endorsed the president’s interpretation,” she said last month. “This court will not be the first.”
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