The Supreme Court wrestled on Thursday with the Trump administration’s complaints that federal judges have exceeded their authority in temporarily blocking some of his policy moves for the whole country.
Several of the justices appeared torn between two concerns. They appeared skeptical that single district judges should have the power to freeze executive actions throughout the nation.
But they also seemed troubled by the legality — and consequences — of the executive order underlying the case: an order issued by President Trump on his first day in office ending birthright citizenship, or the granting of automatic citizenship to all babies born in the United States.
Three lower federal judges have said Mr. Trump’s order violated the 14th Amendment of the Constitution as well as longstanding precedent and blocked the policy across the country. In an unusual move, the justices had agreed to hear oral argument on whether the judges should have limited their rulings only to the states, advocacy groups and individuals that had sued over the order.
The Trump administration had asked the justices to consider the legality of such injunctions, which have been a major impediment to Mr. Trump’s agenda.
But the justices appeared to struggle with how they might quickly weigh in on the legality of the order, which the administration had not asked them to review.
“This case is very different from a lot of our nationwide injunction cases in which many of us have expressed frustration at the way district courts are doing their business,” Justice Elena Kagan said, appearing to articulate the view of several of the justices. She noted that such injunctions have been used to block policies under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
“In the first Trump administration, it was all done in San Francisco, and then in the next administration, it was all done in Texas, and there is a big problem that is created by that mechanism,” Justice Kagan said.
The birthright citizenship case, she said, presents a potentially unique problem: The government could lose repeatedly in lower courts, but if those losses applied only to individuals who sued and not millions of others, the government might not appeal. How then would the Supreme Court weigh in on the order’s constitutionality?
“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 have sued over the order.
The justices signaled that they might try to find a middle ground, perhaps by issuing guidance that would allow temporary nationwide injunctions but only for some kinds of cases, or by requesting more briefing on the merits of the underlying executive order.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh pressed Solicitor General D. John Sauer on how the Trump administration planned to carry out its order.
“What do hospitals do with a newborn?” Justice Kavanaugh asked. “What do states do with a newborn?”
Mr. Sauer replied that “federal officials will have to figure that out.”
The Trump administration is not the first to confront the issue of lower court federal judges blocking policies on a sweeping basis. The debate over whether such freezes are legal has simmered for years. But Mr. Trump has expressed particular outrage about them since he returned to office.
On issue after issue, the White House has been stopped by judges from carrying out Mr. Trump’s initiatives while they are litigated in court. Those efforts include his ability 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.
A decision that limits nationwide injunctions could dramatically reshape how federal courts handle challenges to Mr. Trump’s policies, curbing the power of federal judges to swiftly block policies and bolstering executive power. Groups opposing Mr. Trump’s actions would most likely have to bring many individual claims, or pursue other legal pathways, such as class-action lawsuits.
Much of Thursday’s argument focused on technical legal questions related to whether other legal pathways would provide the same practical effect of a nationwide injunction. Mr. Sauer argued that tools like class-action certification — in which a judge agrees a lawsuit can proceed on behalf of a large group of similarly situated people — would be better ways to handle disputes over executive actions.
Kelsi B. Corkran, a lawyer who argued on behalf of immigrant advocacy groups that challenged the policy, said such mechanisms were cumbersome and could delay relief for those challenging orders like the one seeking to end birthright citizenship.
The Supreme Court has never before ruled directly on the legality of nationwide injunctions, in part because judges have used the tool far more frequently in recent years.
But several justices have previously signaled opposition to their use. In a 2020 decision, Justice Gorsuch criticized injunctions of “‘nationwide,’ ‘universal’ or ‘cosmic’ scope,” writing that such “patently unworkable” rulings were “sowing chaos.” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. has also criticized nationwide blocks in a recent dissent joined by other conservatives.
In a social media post Thursday before the argument began, Mr. Trump called the matter a “big case.” He did not address the question of nationwide injunctions, but instead defended his citizenship order.
“Birthright Citizenship was not meant for people taking vacations to become permanent Citizens of the United States of America, and bringing their families with them, all the time laughing at the ‘SUCKERS’ that we are!” Mr. Trump wrote.
Birthright citizenship — the practice of granting citizenship to people born in the United States, even to parents who 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 constitutional interpretation.
Should the Trump administration sway the justices, the immediate implications for Mr. Trump’s executive action would not be entirely clear. The groups that have challenged the order have warned of chaos, with birthright citizenship potentially ending in the states that sued but not in those that did not.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed similar concerns Thursday, arguing that the executive order violated multiple Supreme Court precedents. If judges were not allowed to block it, she said, it would affect “thousands of children who are going to be born without citizenship papers.” Some of them, she said, could be rendered stateless if their parents’ home countries did not accept them as citizens.
Trump administration lawyers have called such fears overblown, and complained that nationwide injunctions have prevented the executive branch from even preparing to carry out Mr. Trump’s orders by writing or issuing guidance about how a policy might work.
Dozens of people gathered outside the Supreme Court before the arguments to protest for immigrants’ rights, carrying signs and chanting.
One of the demonstrators, Ama Frimpong, a legal director at CASA, an immigration advocacy group that sued over the executive order, said that she saw the government’s argument as “an attack on Black and brown families.”
Inside the courtroom, two top Justice Department officials were seated at the front of a section for members of the public. Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, and another senior official, Emil Bove, sat together and watched the hearing closely and impassively. At one point, when Justice Kagan discussed the Trump administration’s continuous losses in the cases and her belief that they would continue to lose, the audience laughed. Mr. Bove and Mr. Blanche did not.
While the justices have issued written orders in response to emergency applications that arose from other Trump administration actions, Thursday’s case was the first time since Mr. Trump returned to office that the Supreme Court heard an oral argument stemming from one of his policies.
The argument took place after the justices heard all of their scheduled cases this term, and in the weeks before they begin issuing their most consequential decisions of the year — an unusual move that signals that the justices regard the dispute as significant enough to consider immediately.
For now, Mr. Trump’s executive order remains blocked throughout the country while the justices consider the case. The court might not issue a decision until late June or early July, but the unusual posture of the case could prompt quicker action.
Adam Liptak, Hamed Aleaziz, Mattathias Schwartz and Steven Moity contributed reporting.
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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