Donald Trump took the fight over his attempt to restrict automatic U.S. birthright citizenship to the Supreme Court on Thursday as the Republican president’s administration asked the justices to narrow a judicial block imposed on this key element of his hardline approach toward immigration.
The Justice Department made the request challenging the scope of three nationwide injunctions issued against Trump’s order by federal courts in Washington state, Massachusetts and Maryland.
The administration said the injunctions should be scaled back from applying universally and limited to just the plaintiffs that brought the cases and are “actually within the courts’ power.”
“Universal injunctions have reached epidemic proportions since the start of the current administration,” the Justice Department said in the filing. “This court should declare that enough is enough before district courts’ burgeoning reliance on universal injunctions becomes further entrenched.”
Trump’s order, signed on his first day back in office on Jan. 20, directed federal agencies to refuse to recognize the citizenship of U.S.-born children who do not have at least one parent who is an American citizen or lawful permanent resident.
The order was intended to apply starting Feb. 19 but has been blocked nationwide by multiple federal judges.
Trump’s action has drawn a series of lawsuits from plaintiffs, including 22 Democratic state attorneys general, immigrant rights advocates and expectant mothers. They argue among other things that Trump’s order violates a right enshrined in the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment that provides that anyone born in the United States is a citizen.
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 administration contends that the 14th Amendment, long understood to confer citizenship to virtually anyone born in the United States, does not extend to immigrants who are in the country illegally or even to immigrants whose presence is lawful but temporary, such as university students or those on work visas.
Its request to the justices marks its latest trip to the top U.S. judicial body to defend Trump’s actions. The Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority includes three justices appointed by Trump during his first term as president.
Trump’s push to restrict birthright citizenship is part of a broader immigration and border crackdown that includes tasking the U.S. military with aiding border security and issuing a broad ban on asylum.
The judges who ruled against Trump’s order faulted it as conflicting with the Constitution.
An 1898 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a case called United States v. Wong Kim Ark long has been interpreted as guaranteeing that children born in the United States to noncitizen parents are entitled to American citizenship.
Trump’s Justice Department has argued that the court’s ruling in that case was narrower, applying to children whose parents had a “permanent domicile and residence in the United States.”
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