Supreme Court agonizes over whether lower courts can block Trump birthright citizenship order

Supreme Court justices indicated Thursday they were deeply split over whether to restrict lower court judges from issuing sweeping nationwide injunctions as they heard arguments over the Trump administration’s bid to lift a stay on the president’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship.In a session lasting two-and-a-half hours, the justices largely skipped debating the merits of Trump’s Day One action, which would end the practice of automatically recognizing US-born children of illegal immigrants as citizens, and instead examined whether a single federal judge could or should be allowed to block such orders from taking effect.A group of 22 states had sued the Trump administration over the executive order, and the president’s team was hit with three injunctions issued by federal judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington state.

Three separate appeals courts had roundly rejected efforts to throw out those injunctions.“There are all kinds of abuses of nationwide injunctions,” liberal Justice Elena Kagan asked Sauer, “but I think that the question that this case presents is, that if one thinks that it’s quite clear that the [executive order] is illegal, how does one get to that result on your set of rules without the possibility of a nationwide injunction?”Justices across the political spectrum — including conservatives Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas as well as liberal Ketanji Brown Jackson — have griped publicly about the frequent use of nationwide injunctions among lower court judges.“The underlying point,” said conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, “is that these district judges aren’t just throwing these universal injunctions, they are finding these actions illegal because they’re exceeding existing authority.

And oftentimes we are too.”In March, a tally by the Harvard Law Review found that lower courts lodged at least 64 national injunctions against Trump during his tenure, compared to just six lodged against f...