The Supreme Court announced on Thursday that it would hear arguments in a few weeks over President Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship.
The brief order by the justices was unsigned and gave no reasoning, as is typical in such emergency cases. But the unusual move is a sign that the justices consider the matter significant enough that they would immediately hold oral argument on the government’s request to lift a nationwide pause on the policy.
The justices announced they would defer any consideration of the temporary block on the policy until they heard oral arguments, which they set for May 15.
That means that the executive order, which would end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and foreign residents, will remain paused in every state while the court considers the case.
The order was the latest response to a series of emergency applications brought by the Trump administration to challenge lower court blocks on a number of policies, including efforts to freeze more than a billion dollars in foreign aid and the deportation of Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador without due process.
In three emergency applications, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to find that lower courts had erred in imposing bans on the birthright citizenship policy that extended beyond the parties involved in the litigation. It did not ask the court to weigh in on the constitutionality of that executive order, which was challenged soon after it was signed.
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