US President Donald Trump sits during his meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on March 13, 2025. Photo by Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa USA (Sipa via AP Images).
President Donald Trump on Thursday appealed to the nation’s highest court in an effort to resuscitate a ban on birthright citizenship.
Acting Solicitor General Sarah M. Harris, in a 43-page application for a partial stay, grapples with three nationwide injunctions that bar the administration from moving forward with the constitutionally fraught effort to drastically remake the American system by undoing the legal promise of citizenship that has held sway for nearly 130 years.
The filing before the U.S. Supreme Court largely eschews arguing the merits of the underlying birthright citizenship policy in favor of fighting over the propriety of the injunctions issued in each case.
In no uncertain terms, the Trump administration accused district courts of overstepping their bounds through the scope and breadth of relief issued in the various lawsuits over the stalled-out policy.
“Government-by-universal-injunction has persisted long enough, and has reached a fever pitch in recent weeks. It is long past time to restore district courts to their proper — and properly limited — role in a democratic society.””
In Maryland, Washington and Massachusetts, federal judges issued orders prohibiting federal agencies from implementing or enforcing President Trump’s Executive Order 14160.
And, in each successive order granting injunctive relief, the judges extended that relief to cover the policy generally — not just for the complaining plaintiffs in each of the underlying lawsuits.
Notably, the injunctive relief granted in each of the three consolidated lawsuits was left undisturbed by concomitant courts of appeal.
The Trump administration says they want a “modest” change: rewriting the injunctions so that they only cover the respective plaintiffs.
“The district courts should have limited their preliminary injunctions to the parties properly before them: the individual respondents, the identified members of the organizational respondents, and, only if they are proper parties, the state respondents,” the government’s motion for a partial stay reads. “That modest relief would correct the district courts’ massive remedial foul.”
To hear the government tell it, the U.S. Constitution forbids so-called “Article III” courts from exercising power that places a “severe toll on the federal court system” because such injunctions “conflict with longstanding limits on equitable relief.” The strength of this constitutional argument is based on four concurrences to majority opinions by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.
Another constitutional argument offered by the government rubbishes the ability of lower courts to cabin or constrain the executive or legislative branch to the point that a judge might try to “exercise general legal oversight.” For this proposition, the motion cites two high court majority opinions — from 1923 and 2021.
The filing argues that lower courts are limited to acting on cases or controversies implicating “individual” rights.
“Courts that sustain such claims may grant the challenger appropriate relief — for instance, an injunction preventing the enforcement of a challenged law or policy against that individual — but cannot grant relief to strangers to the litigation,” the motion goes on.
This aggressive tack toward the availability of injunctive relief — or, rather, the ability of district courts to grant such relief — is matched by a traditionally aggressive stance on standing doctrine.
From the stay motion, at length:
Universal injunctions also contravene this Court’s precedents on Article III standing. “[S]tanding is not dispensed in gross,” so plaintiffs must establish standing “for each form of relief that they seek.” And a plaintiff’s remedy must be “limited to the inadequacy that produced his injury in fact.” Even if respondents have standing to seek relief for themselves, they lack standing to seek relief for third parties, as to whom plaintiffs cannot “sufficiently answer the question: ‘What’s it to you?’”
In other words, the injunctions in the cases have made short work of standing requirements, the government argues. And, more to the point, the judges in two of the cases incorrectly granted standing to state plaintiffs altogether, according to the acting solicitor general.
A mirror-image complaint offered by the Trump administration is that the injunctions have harmed states that want a ban on birthright citizenship enforced. Those states, the government says, believe such a ban will reduce their “costs from illegal immigration.”
The motion for a stay goes on to try and convince the justices that the question of “universal injunctions” itself is “certworthy” and therefore ripe for an eventual oral argument and final disposition. To this end, the government cites another handful of concurrences from Thomas and Gorsuch — while also adding Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s name to the list of those who have questioned the practice.
Apart from claiming a circuit split on universal injunctive relief, the filing also says the issue has become an acute crisis of sorts.
“That question has become more urgent during the current Administration,” the motion goes on. “According to one count, district courts issued 14 universal injunctions against the federal government through the first three years of President Biden’s term. By contrast, courts issued 15 universal injunctions (or temporary restraining orders) against the current Administration in February 2025 alone.”
The government goes on to complain that the “sharp rise in universal injunctions stops the Executive Branch from performing its constitutional functions before any courts fully examine the merits of those actions.”
This state of affairs is simply unworkable, the government says.
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From the stay motion, again, at length:
As the present cases illustrate, moreover, district courts have been issuing overlapping universal injunctions concerning the same policies. Overlapping universal injunctions are even more problematic than other universal remedies. Such “jurisdictionally messy” orders create a serious risk that different courts will subject the government to conflicting nationwide obligations with respect to the same policy. Overlapping injunctions also heighten the asymmetric stakes of universal-injunction practice; even if the federal government were to obtain relief from a nationwide injunction in one circuit, it still would need to comply with an overlapping nationwide injunction issued by another court in another circuit.
“Universal injunctions have reached epidemic proportions since the start of the current Administration,” the motion continues at one point. “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.”
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