Key events
When will the supreme court justices rule on birthright citizenship dispute?
The supreme court is expected to issue a ruling on the government’s request before its term ends for summer recess, which is usually at the end of June or the beginning of July.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the UAE is keen on continuing to work with the US to achieve peace and stability in the region, president Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan told Donald Trump during a meeting at Qasr Al Watan in Abu Dhabi.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggests class action lawsuits could replace need for nationwide injunctions
CNN has more on Kavanaugh’s comments indicating he could be open to siding with the Trump administration.
Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that class certification would suffice for allowing the challengers to get broad relief from Trump’s executive order, and brushed away the arguments from a lawyer for those challengers that relying on class certification as a tool raises many of the same issues as nationwide injunctions.
Kavanaugh asked Kelsi Corkran, who was arguing on behalf of individual families facing loss of birthright citizenship:
Doesn’t class action solve the problem?
Corkran countered that, with that option, many of the concerns raised about nationwide injunctions – such as forum shopping and foisting emergency disputes on the supreme court, would still exist.
That point didn’t seem to sway Kavanaugh. While he didn’t disagree, he stressed that the class actions might be the technically appropriate way of approaching the dispute under existing court rules. “We care about technicalities,” he said.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pushed back on the idea, touted especially by Kavanaugh, saying nationwide injunctions are doing a “conceptually different thing” than class actions.
Class actions give those covered within the class an enforceable right against the government, she said.
But such rights are not granted to people nationwide with nationwide injunctions, she said. Instead, those people are just benefiting from an order that requires the government to stop doing an unlawful thing, she added.
Vice-president JD Vance and secretary of state Marco Rubio to attend inaugural mass of Pope Leo XIV
Away from the supreme court hearing for a moment, it was announced earlier that JD Vance will lead a US delegation to Vatican City to attend the inaugural mass of Pope Leo XIV on Sunday.
The vice-president and second lady Usha Vance will be joined by secretary of state Marco Rubio and his wife Jeanette Rubio.
Trump’s executive order would allow US citizenship ‘to turn on and off’ over state lines, says New Jersey solicitor general
Per the Associated Press, New Jersey’s solicitor general Jeremy Feigenbaum described how the administration’s stance – that the birthright citizenship order should only be blocked in the places that sued – is unworkable.
He noted that people move to New Jersey from other states all the time. If they were born in a state where Trump’s order deprives them of citizenship and then move to New Jersey, they’d be eligible for benefits available to citizens but wouldn’t have been given the social security number required to access them.
Feigenbaum warned that never before in history has the country allowed “people’s citizenship to turn on and off” when you cross state lines.
Joseph Gedeon
Kelsi Corkran, the final lawyer of the day who is arguing on behalf of individual families facing loss of birthright citizenship, opens by saying the Trump order is “blatantly unlawful”. She cites the 14th amendment, common law, a century of precedent — and every court that’s looked at the issue.
She also defends the nationwide injunction blocking the order. The government claims courts can’t grant relief beyond the named plaintiffs. Corkran says they can, especially when fundamental rights and widespread harm are at stake.
This, she argues, is about preserving the legal status quo — not rewriting it.
Nancy Pelosi criticizes Trump for calling the US ‘stupid’ as she joins protesters
Robert Tait
Nancy Pelosi, the former House of Representatives’ speaker and one of several Democrats to address the rally, said Trump had called the US “stupid” in upholding the 14th amendment.
In response, she said:
No Mr President, America isn’t stupid. It’s the Constitution of the United States which all of us in elective office take an oath to protect and defend.
Quoting the constitution, she recited:
All persons born are naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction there are other citizens of the United States and the state wherein they reside, no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges of immunities, of immunities of citizens of the United States.
“This is important,” she continued, “because this is what’s going on in the court as well, or nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of the law, or deny any person within this jurisdiction the equal protections of the law. So this is about birthright, it’s about citizenship, it’s about due process.”
But she warned that members of Congress could only do so much to defend the constitution and called for a popular groundswell to express itself.
“The fact is that we can just do so much in the Congress, and [although] we are committed to do that, the outside mobilization is very, very important,” she said.
Justice Brown Jackson summarizes Trump administration’s argument as ‘catch me if you can’
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pressed Sauer on whether his opposition to a universal injunction in the citizen birthright case could lead to requiring every individual to file their own lawsuit in the case. She said:
The real concern, I think, is that your argument seems to turn our justice system, in my view at least, into a ‘catch me if you can’ kind of regime, where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights.
Sauer countered that Jackson’s“catch me if you can” system negatively impacts the administration, pushing them to battle every jurisdiction where cases could pop up. He said:
I think the ‘catch me if you can’ problem operates in the opposite direction, where we have the government racing from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, having to sort of clear the table in order to implement a new policy.
Justice Samuel Alito says district judges act like ‘monarchs’ in their courtrooms
Joseph Gedeon
Justice Samuel Alito questioned New Jersey’s solicitor general on the broader implications of allowing nationwide injunctions, painting district judges as “monarchs” in their courtrooms.
“There are 680 district court judges, and they are dedicated and they are scholarly… but sometimes they’re wrong,” Alito said, describing what he called an “occupational disease” among judges who believe: “I am right and I can do whatever I want.”
The justice outlined a scenario where a single judge blocks a presidential action nationwide, appellate courts uphold it, and the Supreme Court faces emergency applications without full briefing.
And just before, Justice Neil Gorsuch similarly asked: “How would you get the merits of this case to us promptly?”
In response, Jeremy Feigenbaum acknowledged the practical concerns but maintained states have “never believed… that [nationwide injunctions] were categorically off the table” regardless of which administration’s policies were affected.
“Sometimes you are going to have cases where it is impossible to remedy the state’s own injuries, and the alternatives are not practically or legally workable,” Feigenbaum argued.
Joseph Gedeon
New Jersey’s solicitor general Jeremy Feigenbaum has begun arguments defending the nationwide block on Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship order, leaning on how hard it would be to get state-by-state implementation.
“This injunction was properly designed to ensure states would get relief for our own Article Three injuries,” Feigenbaum told the justices.
Feigenbaum argues the government’s approach “would require citizenship to vary based on the state in which you’re born, or even turn on or off when someone crosses state lines” – creating what he called “serious and unanswerable questions” for both federal and state authorities.
“Since the 14th amendment, our country has never allowed American citizenship to vary based on the state in which someone resides,” he said.
When questioned about the historical basis for nationwide injunctions, Feigenbaum acknowledged they should be “reserved for narrow circumstances” but insisted this case clearly meets that threshold.
Amy Coney Barrett might not side with conservative judges
During early questioning, conservative justices John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh indicated that they might possibly side with Donald Trump’s ban on birthright citizenship.
However, Amy Coney Barrett, who was appointed by Trump in 2020, questioned solicitor general John Sauer on the practical implications of allowing Trump’s executive order to go into effect.
Joseph Gedeon
Solicitor General John Sauer, responding to justice Kavanaugh, argued that there has been a flurry of nationwide injunctions recently, claiming 40 such orders had been issued in just the past four months.
Harkening back to the New Deal era in the 1930s, Sauer noted that one policy then prompted lawsuits from more than 1,000 individual plaintiffs – suggesting an alternative to blanket nationwide blocks.
Kavanaugh did not appear to be buying it, and questioned whether the 30-day timeline in Donald Trump’s executive order made any sense for something as complicated as redefining citizenship.
Robert Tait
Outside the court, demonstrators, chanting slogans in English and Spanish, held up placards saying: “Birthright Citizenship isn’t a conditional privilege.”
Here are some pictures of the scenes outside the supreme court:
Joseph Gedeon
About 45 minutes in of hearing arguments, justice Elena Kagan dismissed the government’s legal strategy on nationwide injunctions.
“In a case in which the government is losing constantly… it’s up to you whether to take this case to us,” Kagan said, adding: “If I were in your shoes, there’s no way I’d bring this case.”
Justice Thomas comes out against nationwide injuctions
Joseph Gedeon
Justice Clarence Thomas unsurprisingly came out against nationwide injunctions, suggesting they represent a relatively recent and unnecessary development in American law.
“The country survived until the 1960s without universal injunctions,” Thomas said.
He implied the judicial tool is not essential for a functioning legal system, which aligns with the conservative’s long-held opinions against nationwide injunctions. In Trump v. Hawaii during the president’s first term, Thomas called them “legally and historically dubious”.
Justice Kagan questions practicality of limiting court powers, asking if everyone affected should bring their own lawsuit?
Joseph Gedeon
Justice Elena Kagan pressed the administration on the practicality of limiting nationwide injunctions – getting into the concerns about citizenship rights becoming a logistical nightmare that could unfold across the country.
“Does every single person that is affected by this EO have to bring their own suit?” Kagan asked. “Are there alternatives? How long does it take?”
It highlighted a fundamental problem with narrowing injunctions in a case involving constitutional rights:
How do we get to the result that there is a single rule of citizenship that is the rule that we’ve historically applied rather than the rule the EO would have us do?
The justice is concerned that without nationwide injunctions, some newborns might be denied citizenship while others receive it, depending on where they’re born or whether their parents could afford legal representation.
Solicitor general calls nationwide injuctions a ‘nuclear weapon’ on executive power
Joseph Gedeon
Solicitor general D John Sauer arguing on behalf of the administration said that nationwide injunctions against presidential actions lack historical precedent and represent an unprecedented “nuclear weapon” on executive power.
Sauer claimed the original 1789 Judiciary Act, which established federal courts’ powers to hear “suits in equity”, never contemplated the sweeping judicial blocks now regularly issued against presidential actions.
“If freezing a likely insolvent debtor’s assets is ‘a nuclear weapon in the law,’” Sauer said. “I don’t know what this is where repeatedly—40 times in this administration—we’re being enjoined against the entire world.”
Robert Tait
Flores said the supreme court had to carefully consider the impact of narrowing the effect of the district court’s injunction.
“Iif they decide to limit the injunction, then suddenly you will have children born who may be stateless, who may be undocumented, and that’s unprecedented,” she said. “There’s no system in place to then go back and retroactively make sure children born in this interim period would be citizens. it’s not a simple technical legal question, it’s it really could split our country in half.”
