Trump asks SCOTUS to take up birthright citizenship order

The administration on Thursday filed emergency applications asking the country’s highest court to intervene in lower courts’ temporary orders pausing President Donald Trump’s attempt to end automatic birthright citizenship. The president’s executive order would only extend automatic citizenship to people born in the United States if at least one of their parents had citizenship or lawful permanent residency. Federal district judges in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Washington state last month issued preliminary injunctions against the order, which the president signed in January. The lower courts’ rulings halted the federal government from implementing the change throughout the country.

The Trump administration has appealed each of the rulings but appeals courts in Massachusetts, California, and Virginia declined to lift the injunctions. In the administration’s filings with the U.S. Supreme Court, Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris argued that the lower courts do not have the authority to issue nationwide injunctions. They have prevented the federal government from carrying out its functions, she added. Harris urged the Supreme Court justices to restrict the application of the injunctions to only the plaintiffs named in the three cases.

Who is not eligible for citizenship under the order? Trump’s order would disqualify people born in the United States from citizenship if their mother was unlawfully present in the country and whose father was neither a citizen nor a permanent resident at the time of their birth. Individuals whose mother was lawfully but temporarily in the country or whose father was not a citizen or a legal permanent resident at the time of their birth would also be disqualified.

Central to the case is the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Courts previously interpreted the amendment to mean that anyone born in the United States was automatically a citizen, regardless of their parents’ citizenship. Trump's administration is the first to question the interpretation.

How many plaintiffs are suing the administration over the order? More than two dozen states and cities have brought lawsuits against the Trump administration over the order. In a separate filing, immigrant support nonprofit CASA along with five pregnant women and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project sued the administration in Maryland. The American Civil Liberties Unions of New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts also filed suit.

Dig deeper: Read Addie Offereins’ report in WORLD Magazine about Trump's changes to the immigration system.