One of President Donald Trump’s most controversial executive orders — dismantling birthright citizenship — has been challenged in court and halted by federal judges in three different districts. Now, the three cases against the president’s order will be heard before the U.S. Supreme Court. In an order released late last week, the Supreme Court announced that oral arguments will be heard on Thursday, with the Trump administration requesting a stay of the nationwide injunctions placed on the executive order.

On his first day back in the White House, the president signed an executive order entitled, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” In that order, the president stipulated that people born in the U.S. are not automatically citizens unless they are also “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S., in accord with the Fourteenth Amendment and legislation approved by Congress. Thus, the president clarified that “United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States” if a person’s mother is in the U.S. illegally at the time of birth and the person’s father is not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, or if the person’s mother is in the U.S. on the basis of a temporary provision, such as a non-immigrant visa.

Just days later, Judge Deborah Boardman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, a Biden appointee, issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration from enforcing the executive order. “The President’s novel interpretation of the Citizenship Clause contradicts the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment and conflicts with 125-year-old binding Supreme Court precedent,” Boardman argued. Reagan-appointed Judge John Coughenour of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington and Obama-appointed Judge Leo Sorokin of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts reached the same conclusion, with Coughenour issuing both a temporary restraining order (TRO) and a subsequent preliminary injunction and Sorokin issuing a preliminary injunction, describing the Trump administration’s arguments as “flawed” in a memorandum opinion. Sorokin argued that the Trump administrations arguments focus:

“on the parents, rather than the child whose citizenship is at stake. In so doing, these interpretations stray from the text of the Citizenship Clause. The Fourteenth Amendment says nothing of the birthright citizen’s parents, and efforts to import such considerations at the time of enactment and when the Supreme Court construed the text were rejected.”

After appellate courts denied a stay against the injunctions, the Trump administration petitioned the Supreme Court to intervene. “These cases — which involve challenges to the President’s January 20, 2025 Executive Order concerning birthright citizenship — raise important constitutional questions with major ramifications for securing the border,” wrote Sarah Harris, then the acting U.S. Solicitor General. However, the Trump administration narrowed its request before the Supreme Court, asking only that the nation’s highest court bar inferior courts from issuing “universal injunctions” that block the president’s executive orders “from being enforced anywhere in the country…”

“And these overlapping injunctions prohibit federal agencies from even developing guidance about how they would implement the Order. Yet three courts of appeals refused to limit that sweeping interim relief to the parties actually before the courts,” Harris argued. Quoting many of the Supreme Court’s justices themselves, she continued, “Such universal injunctions, though ‘a relatively new phenomenon,’ have become ubiquitous, posing ‘a question of great significance that has been in need of the Court’s attention for some time.’” She argued:

“Universal injunctions have reached epidemic proportions since the start of the current Administration. Courts have graduated from universal preliminary injunctions to universal temporary restraining orders, from universal equitable relief to universal monetary remedies, and from governing the whole Nation to governing the whole world. District courts have issued more universal injunctions and TROs during February 2025 alone than through the first three years of the Biden Administration. That sharp rise in universal injunctions stops the Executive Branch from performing its constitutional functions before any courts fully examine the merits of those actions, and threatens to swamp [the Supreme] Court’s emergency docket.”

Harris further observed that “individual district courts layered their universal injunctions on top of each other, creating a ‘jurisdictionally messy’ scenario where the government must run the table over months of litigation in multiple courts of appeals to have any chance of implementing the Order anywhere.” She concluded, “This Court should declare that enough is enough before district courts’ burgeoning reliance on universal injunctions becomes further entrenched. … Only this Court’s intervention can prevent universal injunctions from becoming universally acceptable.”

The contention that the Supreme Court’s emergency docket may be overwhelmed with petitions relating to lower courts’ nationwide injunctions and TROs has some weight to it. Already the Supreme Court has had to weigh in on a number of cases in which the Trump administration’s agenda has been hampered by federal judges. Most recently, current U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer petitioned the Supreme Court to halt an injunction issued by Obama-appointed Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts. Talwani had previously stopped Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem from terminating parole programs used by the Biden administration to bring hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants into the U.S.

In some cases, the Supreme Court has sided with the Trump administration in staying lower court’s sweeping injunctions or TROs. For example, the nation’s highest court did away with a district court’s order demanding that the Trump administration continue funding diversity, equity, inclusion-related educational grants and stayed another order requiring the administration to rehire thousands of fired federal employees. The Supreme Court also stayed a lower court’s order blocking the Department of Defense (DOD) from firing transgender-identifying armed services personnel. In one instance, the Supreme Court vacated a controversial TRO issued by Obama-appointed Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which blocked the president from ordering deportations under the authority of the Alien Enemies Act (AEA). Shortly afterwards, however, the Supreme Court imposed similar restrictions on the Trump administration in the same case, in a move Justice Samuel Alito lambasted as “unprecedented and legally questionable.”

In comments to The Washington Stand, America Family Association (AFA) Action Senior Counsel Philip Jauregui said, “It is critical that the Supreme Court intervene because the Left is trying to selectively use their favorite district courts to usurp presidential power.” He explained, “The Left’s old play book was to usurp legislative power and make new laws from the bench, but this time they are masquerading as fake little presidents in black robes and usurping presidential power.”

“The left wants to run the clock on Trump’s four-year term by delaying him through lawfare in their chosen lower courts. The Supreme Court must police their own branch,” Jauregui continued. He said that if the Supreme Court does not police the lower courts, then “the people will stand behind President Trump as he asserts even stronger forms of presidential power which will in turn have the effect of weakening the power of the entire federal judicial branch.” The attorney observed, “Chief Justice Roberts would be wise to protect the judiciary from its own bad apples by forming a majority of the Supreme Court to correct these lower court abuses.”

Since returning to the Oval Office in January, the president’s agenda has been besieged by lower courts issuing a seemingly endless stream of nationwide injunctions and TROs. In addition to the cases above, federal judges have blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to limit the number of “refugees” brought into the country, stop taxpayer dollars from funding “free” lawyers for illegal immigrants, require proof of citizenship before registering to vote in U.S. elections, strip “sanctuary cities” of federal taxpayer funding, bar DEI programs from American classrooms, return previously-deported foreign terrorist organization affiliates, grant the Associated Press access to White House and Air Force One press briefing facilities, keep biological men out of women’s prisons, protect children from gender transition “mutilation” procedures, remove transgender propaganda from government websites, identify and eliminate government waste and fraud, and more.