The Supreme Court is hearing its first set of Trump-related arguments in the second Trump presidency. The case stems from the executive order President Donald Trump issued on his first day in office that would deny citizenship to children born on U.S. soil to parents who are in the country illegally or temporarily.
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00:00On January 20th, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14160, protecting the meaning
00:07and value of American citizenship. This order reflects the original meaning of the 14th
00:13Amendment, which guaranteed citizenship to the children of former slaves, not to illegal aliens
00:18or temporary visitors. Multiple district courts promptly issued nationwide or universal injunctions
00:26blocking this order, and a cascade of such universal injunctions followed. Since January
00:3120th, district courts have now issued 40 universal injunctions against the federal government,
00:37including 35 from the same five judicial districts. This is a bipartisan problem that has now spanned
00:44the last five presidential administrations. Universal injunctions exceed the judicial power
00:50granted in Article 3, which exists only to address the injury to the complaining party.
00:54They transgress the traditional balance of equitable authority, and they create a host
01:00of practical problems.
01:01I mean, that's a lot of words, and I don't have an answer for if one thinks. And, you know,
01:07look, there are all kinds of abuses of nationwide injunctions. But I think that the question that
01:12this case presents is that if one thinks that it's quite clear that the EO is illegal, how
01:19does one get to that result in what time frame on your set of rules without the possibility of a
01:26nationwide injunction?
01:27On this case, and on many similar cases, the appropriate way to do it is for there to be
01:32multiple lower courts considering it, the appropriate percolation that closed to the
01:36lower courts, and then ultimately, this court decides the merits in a nationwide binding
01:41precedent. You have a complete inversion of that through the nationwide injunctions with the
01:45district courts.
01:45So, General Sauer, are you really going to answer Justice Kagan by saying there's no way to do this
01:49expeditiously?
01:50Well, I'll refer to my former answers. Rule 23 provides the tools to do so, multiple injunctions.
01:55But you resisted Justice Kagan when she said, could the individual plaintiffs form a class?
02:01We, uh, that has never been briefed in the court below. I do not concede that we wouldn't oppose
02:06class certification in this particular case. There may be arguments that this case is or is not
02:10appropriate for class certification.
02:11This court should deny the emergency application because this injunction was properly designed to
02:16ensure that the states would get relief for our own Article III injuries, as we suffer significant
02:22pocketbook and sovereign harms from implementation of this executive order, including from the
02:27application of the CO to the 6,000 babies born to New Jersey parents out of state every year.
02:33The U.S. prefers alternative approaches for granting that relief, alternatives it never raised in the
02:38district court below. But its approach would require citizenship to vary based on the state in which
02:44you're born, or even turn on or off when someone crosses state lines, raising serious and unanswered
02:50administrability questions, not just for the federal government, but also for the states. And it would
02:56offend the text and history of the citizenship clause itself. Since the 14th Amendment, our country has never
03:03allowed American citizenship to vary based on the state in which someone resides.