President Donald Trump’s administration asked the Supreme Court in a series of emergency appeals Thursday to allow him to move forward with plans to end birthright citizenship, elevating a fringe legal theory that several lower courts have resoundingly rejected.
In a series of emergency appeals, the Trump administration argued that lower courts had gone too far in handing down nationwide injunctions blocking the controversial policy, and it asked the justices to limit the impact of those orders.
A federal judge in January described his executive order as “blatantly unconstitutional” and blocked its implementation. Days later, a judge in Maryland said that Trump’s plan “runs counter to our nation’s 250-year history of citizenship by birth.”
Appeals courts have brushed aside the Trump administration’s request to pause lower court rulings that imposed nationwide injunctions on an executive order he signed on the first day of his second term.
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For more than 150 years, courts have understood the 14th Amendment’s text to guarantee citizenship to anyone “born