Trump DOJ Grilled By SCOTUS
The Supreme Court chambers echoed with tension and constitutional gravity Thursday as justices confronted a tangled web of executive authority, judicial restraint, and the deeply contested terrain of birthright citizenship. While the Trump administration’s order technically stood on procedural footing—aiming to overturn a district court’s universal injunction—everyone in the room knew the true stakes: the fate of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.
At the heart of the matter was the Trump administration’s executive order to deny citizenship to children born on U.S. soil to undocumented immigrants or those on temporary visas. The policy, branded under the title “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” challenges over a century of legal understanding surrounding the 14th Amendment. Yet this case arrived not on the merits of that constitutional argument, but on the procedural battleground of universal injunctions—those sweeping judicial tools that block federal policy nationwide.
Justice Alito says during oral arguments on birthright citizenship EO that judges are vulnerable to the “occupational disease” of thinking “I am bright and I can do whatever I want.” pic.twitter.com/L0elQYpMnO
— Katelynn Richardson (@katesrichardson) May 15, 2025
Solicitor General John Saur came armed with a striking statistic: forty universal injunctions had hamstrung executive policies since President Trump took office. To the administration, this was not just a legal inconvenience but a structural affront to executive power. To others—particularly liberal justices on the bench—it was a vital check.
Though the Court wasn’t directly deciding the constitutionality of denying birthright citizenship, that issue permeated the debate. Justice Kagan’s pointed question—“Let’s just assume you’re dead wrong. How do we get to that result?”—pierced to the core. She emphasized that if the policy were allowed to stand pending full judicial review, “an untold number of people” who should be U.S. citizens would remain in limbo.
Justice Sotomayor didn’t mince words, either, forcefully suggesting the order violated existing precedent. And as Chief Justice Roberts tried to restore order, one could sense the Court teetering between institutional decorum and existential concern.
Trump ahead of oral arguments at the Supreme Court this morning challenging orders blocking his executive order on birthright citizenship: pic.twitter.com/5NMB4JRxVh
— Katelynn Richardson (@katesrichardson) May 15, 2025
Yet the justices were not wholly aligned with the lower courts, either. Justice Alito, ever the critic of judicial overreach, lamented the unchecked power of single district court judges—*“monarchs” in their own courtrooms, as he put it. Clarence Thomas, meanwhile, revisited his long-standing skepticism about the legality of universal injunctions, hinting at an originalist reassessment of judicial scope.
Justice Kavanaugh’s practical question—“What do hospitals do with a newborn?”—brought the philosophical debate crashing into reality. With real-world implications hanging in the balance, he joined others in asking whether a class-action lawsuit might present a narrower, less constitutionally fraught pathway to temporary relief.