March 13 (UPI) — The Trump administration on Thursday sought permission from the Supreme Court to enforce President Donald Trump‘s executive order ending birthright citizenship for most people.
Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris filed three nearly identical Supreme Court filings that ask the court to partially block temporary nationwide injunctions put in place by federal district court judges in Seattle, Massachusetts and Maryland.
“These cases … raise important constitutional questions with major ramifications for securing the border,” Harris says.
“But at this stage, the government comes to this court with a ‘modest’ request: while the parties litigate weighty merits questions,” she says. “The court should ‘restrict the scope’ of multiple preliminary injunctions that ‘purport to cover every person in the country’ [by] limiting those injunctions to parties actually within the courts’ power.”
Harris says the three federal district courts have issued overlapping university injunctions on behalf of 22 states whose attorneys general sought injunctions, two organizations and seven individuals despite each court having limited jurisdictions.
The injunctions apply to hundreds of thousands of individuals who are not party to the cases before the respective courts, Harris says.
The injunctions also prevent enforcement anywhere in the country of Trump’s executive order that greatly restricts application of the birthright citizenship section of the 14th Amendment.
“These overlapping injunctions prohibit federal agencies from even developing guidance about how they would implement the order,” Harris says, adding that three federal courts of appeal refused to limit the injunctive relief in the matter.
Harris says it’s a “relatively new phenomenon” for federal district court judges to enter injunctions to “‘govern the whole nation from their courtrooms.'”
Such universal injunctions are “‘legally and historically dubious'” and “transgress constitutional limits on courts’ powers,which extend only to ‘rendering a judgment or decree upon the rights of the litigants,'” Harris says.
“Universal injunctions have reached epidemic proportions since the start of the current administration” and “compromise the executive branch’s ability to carry out its functions,” Harris says.
“Courts have graduated from universal preliminary injunctions to universal restraining orders, from universal equitable relief to universal monetary remedies,” Harris adds, “and from governing the whole nation to governing the whole world.”
Federal district court judges also have issued more universal injunctions and temporary restraining orders during February 2025 alone than through the first three years of the Biden administration,” Harris says.
“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 this court’s emergency docket,” she says.
The current injunctions also extend to all 50 states and to millions of aliens throughout the nation even though “tailored interim relief for the plaintiffs to these suits would fully redress their alleged harms,” Harris says.
Harris filed the requests on Trump’s behalf and said the way birthright citizenship currently is interpreted creates “strong incentives” for illegal immigration to the United States.
Federal courts for more than 150 years have supported the birthright citizenship interpretation of the 14th Amendment to apply to anyone born in the United States, CNN reported.
The ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project and pro-immigrant advocacy group CASA are the two organizational plaintiffs in the matter.
“The president’s executive order is outrageously illegal and cruel, and it should not be applied to a single baby in this country,” attorney Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, told CNN.
“We are going to continue fighting to ensure that no child is denied their citizenship by this executive order,” Wofsy said.