The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to allow President Trump to end birthright citizenship in some parts of the country, even as legal challenges to the constitutionality of the move proceed in other regions.
The 6-to-3 decision, which was written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett and split along ideological lines, is a major victory for Mr. Trump, and may allow how citizenship is granted in the United States to be reshaped, even temporarily.
The order will not go into effect for 30 days, the justices said in their opinion, allowing its legality to be contested further. The justices also did not address the underlying constitutionality of the president’s order to curtail birthright citizenship, potentially leaving that issue for another day.
The court’s ruling also appeared to upend the ability of single federal judges to freeze policies across the country, a powerful tool that has been used frequently in recent years to block policies instituted by Democratic and Republican administrations.
Justices across the ideological spectrum had been critical of these so-called nationwide injunctions, arguing that they encouraged judge-shopping and improperly circumvented the political process by allowing one judge to halt a policy nationwide.
The surprise decision means that an executive order signed by Mr. Trump ending the practice of extending citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States would be set to take effect in 30 days in the 28 states that have not challenged the measure.
The details of how the policy would be implemented were not immediately clear.
The ability of a single federal judge in one part of the country to pause a policy nationwide has been a major stumbling block for Mr. Trump. These so-called nationwide injunctions are controversial judicial tools, and have prompted intense debate over their legality. They have been used to block Democratic and Republican policies.
Federal trial judges have consistently ruled against the Trump administration, stymieing efforts to withhold funds from schools with diversity programs, to relocate transgender women in federal prisons and to remove deportation protections from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants.
The case before the justices arose from an executive order signed by Mr. Trump on Jan. 20, the first day of his second term, that appeared to upend the principle known as birthright citizenship, which has been part of the Constitution for more than 150 years.
The announcement prompted immediate legal challenges from 22 Democratic-led states and immigrant advocacy organizations and pregnant women concerned that their children might not automatically be granted citizenship. Within days, a federal judge in Seattle, John C. Coughenour, temporarily blocked the executive order. In a standing-room-only proceeding, the judge interrupted a Justice Department lawyer to castigate him.
“I’ve been on the bench for four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is,” Judge Coughenour said, calling Mr. Trump’s order “blatantly unconstitutional.”
Federal judges in Maryland and Massachusetts also issued orders pausing the policy. All three judges extended their orders to the entire country, even to states that had not brought legal challenges.
On March 13, the Trump administration filed an emergency application asking the justices to weigh whether such nationwide injunctions were legal.
The Supreme Court has never issued a ruling that squarely addresses nationwide injunctions. But justices across the ideological spectrum have expressed skepticism over them.
In an unusual move, the justices announced that they would hear oral arguments on the emergency application, blocking the executive order from being implemented in the meantime. Emergency requests are generally decided without a hearing.
At a May 15 argument in the case, the Supreme Court wrangled over the Trump administration’s claims that the lower court judges had exceeded their power.
The justices had two main concerns. Several appeared skeptical that federal judges should be able to freeze executive actions for the entire country, rather than just for parties directly involved in the litigation — the core issue of the case.
But many of the justices also seemed troubled by the practical consequences of allowing the executive order to go into effect, even temporarily and only in some parts of the country. Some of the justices questioned how they might quickly weigh in on the legality of the executive order, which the administration had not asked them to review.
“How would you get the merits of this case to us promptly?” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch asked a lawyer for the attorney general’s office in New Jersey, one of 22 Democratic-led states that sued over the order.
The underlying question — the legality of birthright citizenship — is a core constitutional one. The practice of automatically granting citizenship to children born on American soil, even if their parents are not citizens, has long been considered a tenet of immigration law. The 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, declared 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.”
In 1898, the Supreme Court affirmed that right in a landmark case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark. For more than a century, courts have upheld that interpretation.
Abbie VanSickle covers the United States Supreme Court for The Times. She is a lawyer and has an extensive background in investigative reporting.
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