President Donald Trump has issued a flurry of executive orders aimed at reshaping immigration policy, only to see many of them tied up or halted by federal judges. Now, he’s looking to the Supreme Court to break that pattern.

On Thursday, the Justices will hear arguments in a high-stakes case that sits at the intersection of two fiercely contested areas of law: birthright citizenship and the power of federal courts to block presidential actions nationwide. While the case is ostensibly about Trump’s executive order ending automatic citizenship for the U.S.-born children of non-citizens, legal observers agree the real fight is over the judicial tool that has repeatedly thwarted Trump’s agenda: universal injunctions.

The Trump Administration is not directly asking the court to review the constitutionality of its citizenship order, but is rather urging the Court to curtail or eliminate the ability of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions, which have frozen Trump’s policy in place while litigation unfolds. Trump’s lawyers argue that universal injunctions exceed the constitutional authority of individual judges and prevent the government from implementing policy while cases wind through the courts. Broader relief, they say, should come only through mechanisms like class-action lawsuits—not sweeping injunctions issued by single district judges.

“These injunctions have reached epidemic proportions since the start of the Trump Administration,” the Justice Department wrote in a March filing, noting that more were issued in February 2025 alone than during the first three years of the Biden Administration.
Trump’s executive order, issued on his first day back in office, would deny citizenship to babies born on American soil if both parents lack U.S. citizenship or lawful permanent residency—even if they are in the country legally on temporary visas. But legal experts say the order violates the doctrine of birthright citizenship guaranteed under the 14th Amendment and more than 120 years of court precedent set by the Supreme Court in the landmark 1898 ruling United States v. Wong Kim Ark. “This order is blatantly unconstitutional,” says Rachel Rosenbloom, a law professor at Northeastern University in Boston who is writing a book about the history of efforts to restrict constitutional birthright citizenship. “Many historians and legal scholars, and all of the district court judges who have looked at this order have said there's simply no way that this order is constitutional.”