Three preliminary injunctions have been issued on Trump’s birthright citizenship restrictions.
WASHINGTON—The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to intervene and at least partially roll back multiple preliminary injunctions courts have issued against his executive order to restrict birthright citizenship.
In a brief filed on March 13, Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris told Chief Justice John Roberts that courts had gone too far in issuing nationwide injunctions. The Supreme Court, she said, should limit two of the injunctions—from Washington state and Maryland—to the order’s effect on particular plaintiffs. Another from Massachusetts should be stayed in full, she said.
Harris also asked the court to stay the injunctions in a way that would allow executive agencies to develop and issue guidance explaining how they would implement Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship.
The birthright citizenship lawsuits are among the more than 90 lodged against the administration, as well as among the many to result in court orders that blocked the administration’s actions. In many of these lawsuits, the administration has argued that the plaintiffs lacked standing or were requesting injunctions with relief that was too broad in its scope.
Harris’s brief took aim at the practice of issuing nationwide injunctions and suggested the Supreme Court should intervene to stop purported abuses among lower courts.
“This court should declare that enough is enough before district courts’ burgeoning reliance on universal injunctions becomes further entrenched,” her brief reads. She added that “only this court’s intervention can prevent universal injunctions from becoming universally acceptable.”
By Sam Dorman
