Today begins Supreme Court showdown with highest stakes of all

A legal challenge to President Donald Trump’s measures to end birthright citizenship is headed for oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court.

The high court will hear oral arguments on Thursday in the cases that delivered injunctions from federal judges in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Washington state. The nationwide block on Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship prompted the appeal from the Trump administration.

“The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court in March to intervene and limit the scope of three lower court rulings to cover only individuals directly impacted by the relevant courts (or potentially, the 22 states that challenged Trump’s executive order). But that’s unlikely to be the primary theme at the center of Thursday’s high-profile debate,” Fox News reported.

“Rather, justices are expected to use the oral arguments to weigh the authority of lower courts to issue nationwide, or ‘universal’ injunctions blocking presidential policies — teeing up a high-stakes showdown that pits Trump’s Article II powers against Article III courts,” the outlet continued.

(Video Credit: ABC7)

Trump posted about the pending court proceedings in a post on Truth Social early Thursday.

“Birthright Citizenship was not meant for people taking vacations to become permanent Citizens of the United States of America, and bringing their families with them, all the time laughing at the ‘SUCKERS’ that we are!” he wrote.

pic.twitter.com/97tfkVKsq2

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 15, 2025

“The United States of America is the only Country in the World that does this, for what reason, nobody knows — But the drug cartels love it!” Trump continued.

The president contended that the measure had “nothing to do with Illegal Immigration” but was rather in response to “Civil War results, and the babies of slaves who our politicians felt, correctly, needed protection.”

“Please explain this to the Supreme Court of the United States,” he added. “Thank you for your attention to this matter. Good luck with this very important case.”

The Fourteenth Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Trump’s January order stated that the 14th Amendment “has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”

“The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’ Consistent with this understanding, the Congress has further specified through legislation that ‘a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ is a national and citizen of the United States at birth,” the order reads.

John Eastman, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and former Trump lawyer, contends that words in the 14th Amendment do not guarantee citizenship to all.

“Most of the rest of the world doesn’t have this notion that you’re born here, you’re automatically a citizen. You have to be somehow part of the political community, and so you can look at what other countries do and find out it’s rather simple,” he told Newsweek.

“This idea has taken root over the last half century, to the point that everybody assumed it was already a done deal, and, in fact, the Supreme Court has never ruled on this,” Eastman said. “But you’ve got a lot of the accumulated barnacles on the wrong view that need to be peeled away.”

Senior Staff Writer
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Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida where she has been writing for the BizPacReview team since 2015.

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