United States President Donald Trump’s administration has filed a series of emergency appeals to the Supreme Court, urging the justices to allow him to proceed with plans to end birthright citizenship.
The appeals, submitted on Thursday, argued that lower courts overstepped by issuing nationwide injunctions that blocked the implementation of the contentious policy.
According to CNN, the administration asked the Supreme Court to narrow the reach of such orders, which have prevented enforcement of Trump’s executive order signed on the first day of his second term.
Appeals courts have previously declined requests from the Trump administration to pause rulings that imposed nationwide bans on the executive directive.
“Universal injunctions have reached epidemic proportions since the start of the current administration,” the Justice Department told the Supreme Court in its emergency appeals.
“Those universal injunctions prohibit a Day 1 Executive Order from being enforced anywhere in the country, as to ‘hundreds of thousands’ of unspecified individuals who are ‘not before the court nor identified by the court.’”
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For more than a century, judicial interpretation of the 14th Amendment has affirmed citizenship for anyone “born or naturalized in the United States,” regardless of their parents’ immigration status. This legal understanding was cemented in an 1898 Supreme Court ruling, and the current court has given no indication of plans to revisit the precedent.
However, some conservative scholars have challenged the long-standing view, arguing that the 14th Amendment’s language restricts citizenship to individuals “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.
According to this theory, people in the country illegally are instead under the jurisdiction of their countries of origin.
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