Trump Admin Demands SCOTUS Teach Uppity Trial Judges A Lesson … By Un-Personing Babies

President Trump’s courtiers do not lack for chutzpah. After four years in which conservatives camped out in Amarillo and Fort Worth collecting nationwide injunctions to block everything from student loan relief, to credit card fee caps, to medication abortion, they have suddenly gotten religion on judicial overreach.

Here’s the intro to a SCOTUS petition filed last night:

Universal injunctions have reached epidemic proportions since the start of the current Administration. Courts have graduated from universal preliminary injunctions to universal temporary restraining orders, from universal equitable relief to universal monetary remedies, and from governing the whole Nation to governing the whole world. District courts have issued more universal injunctions and TROs during February 2025 alone than through the first three years of the Biden Administration. That sharp rise in universal injunctions stops the Executive Branch from performing its constitutional functions before any courts fully examine the merits of those actions, and threatens to swamp this Court’s emergency docket.

Only after several pages of histrionics does the government come to the point: They’d like the Supreme Court to let them abolish birthright citizenship, despite the 14th Amendment and 125 years of Supreme Court precedent, and they’re super pissed that federal judges keep telling them to get bent.

In the Western District of Washington, Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee, wondered, “Where were the lawyers?” when such a “blatantly unconstitutional order” was cooked up.

“If the government wants to change the exceptional American grant of birthright citizenship, it needs to amend the Constitution itself,” he scolded. “That’s how the Constitution works, and that’s how the rule of law works.”

The Ninth Circuit declined the administration’s request to stay Judge Coughenour’s nationwide injunction, as did the First and Fourth Circuits when the DOJ appealed a similar orders from Massachusetts and Maryland judges.

“[I]t it is notable that the government is not prepared to argue that it will likely prevail on the merits of the Executive Order itself,” the majority wrote in the Fourth Circuit order. We are aware of no case – and the government has not cited one – in which a court has stayed a preliminary injunction of a policy, already found likely unlawful, in which the movant did not argue for the policy’s legality.

Notably, Judge Paul Niemeyer dissented on just the grounds cited by the government in its SCOTUS petition: “I would grant the government’s modest motion, which seeks only to cabin the order’s inappropriate reach.”

And that’s the angle the administration is taking here, even quoting Niemeyer’s “modest” language on the first page of the petition. They argue that undocumented parents should have to sue individually to gain citizenship for their newborns. Or, barring that, the administration would like to be permitted to withhold Social Security numbers and passports from children born in red states, which haven’t signed onto any birthright citizenship litigation.

It’s a naked appeal to Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch, each of whom have written in concurrence or dissent inveighing against nationwide relief and in support of unchecked executive power — at least when a Republican is in the White House.

That modest relief would correct the district courts’ massive remedial foul. Nationwide or universal remedies exceed “the power of Article III courts,” conflict with “longstanding limits on equitable relief,” and impose a severe “toll on the federal court system.” Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U.S. 667, 713 (2018) (Thomas, J., concurring); see Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, No. 24A831, slip op. 7 (2025) (Alito, J., dissenting); Poe, 144 S. Ct. at 923-924 (Gorsuch, J. concurring); DHS, 140 S. Ct. at 599-601 (Gorsuch, J., concurring).

Subtle.

Of course, forcing undocumented parents to out themselves and sue the government to secure citizenship for their babies would force all undocumented parents giving birth at hospitals to out themselves, allowing ICE to immediately deport them before a court could offer any relief. And if the executive order were later found to be unconstitutional, as every court which considered the matter has agreed, then parents issued second class birth certificates for their children would have to present themselves again to authorities to receive citizenship documents for their babies. But those are features, not bugs.

And meanwhile, the absolute worst people in the House of Representatives just filed an amicus brief to vindicate their “strong interest in the outcome of this case because Congress, as a co-equal branch of government, has an interest in the courts upholding the Constitution. Specifically, the historical record confirms that the Fourteenth Amendment does not confer citizenship on the children of aliens unlawfully present in the United States.”

Great job, Chief Justice Roberts! You made racism great again.

Trump v. Casa, Inc. [SCOTUS Docket]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.