How the Supreme Court's injunction ruling advances Trump's birthright citizenship fight

While changing the way the government gives citizenship to babies born in the United States is still an uphill climb, the high court's ruling raised the possibility that Trump's new policy to end automatic citizenship could, at least temporarily, take effect in some parts of the country.

"Normally, if you give birth at the hospital, they just automatically issue everyone a Social Security number," Severino told Fox News Digital. "Now the question isn't open and shut like that." 

The order dramatically changed the scope of birthright citizenship, which is outlined under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution and allows babies born to noncitizens in the United States to automatically receive U.S. citizenship in most cases. 

Courts uniformly rejected Trump's policy and blocked it by issuing universal injunctions, which applied to the whole country and not just certain pregnant noncitizens being represented in court.

Seattle-based federal Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee, chastised government attorneys during a February hearing over the matter. 

"It has become ever more apparent that to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals," the judge said. "The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain." 

Coughenour later said that if Trump wanted to change the "exceptional American grant of birthright citizenship," then the president would need to work with Congress to amend the Constitution, rather than attempt to redefine the amendment through an executive order.

In the wake of the Supreme Court's order, courts and plaintiffs are moving quickly to adapt and, in some cases, find workarounds before the 30-day deadline arrives.

Within hours of the high court's decision, plaintiffs who brought a birthright citizenship lawsuit in Maryland asked a judge to change the lawsuit to a class action proceeding that covers all babies who will be born after Trump's executive order takes effect.

The request was one of what is quickly becoming a manifold of court requests that are testing the Supreme Court's injunction decision and potentially undercutting it.

The Supreme Court's decision left intact the ability for judges, if they see fit, to use class action lawsuits or statewide lawsuits to hand down sweeping orders blocking Trump's policies from applying to wide swaths of people.

"The bottom line is that the Trump administration has the right to carry this order out nationwide, except where a court has stayed it as to parties actually involved in a lawsuit challenging it," Severino said.

Regardless of what happens in the coming weeks and months, the underlying merits of Trump's birthright citizenship policy are on track to end up at the Supreme Court.

The justices were able to avoid touching the substance of Trump's argument by merely considering the constitutionality of universal injunctions during this last go-round, but the next time a birthright citizenship lawsuit comes before them, they are likely to have to weigh in on whether Trump's policy is constitutional. 

Severino said she believed the six Republican-appointed justices would rely heavily on "history and tradition" and "what the words were understood to mean in 1868 when the 14th Amendment was passed."

"It's a challenging issue, in part because our immigration system looks so dramatically different now than it did at the time of the 14th Amendment, because the sort of immigration we're looking at was not really on their radar, nor was the type of entitlement state that we are living in," Severino said.

Michael Moreland, Villanova University law school professor, told Fox News Digital there has long been an academic debate about the language in the amendment. It states that babies born in the United States and "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" are citizens. The dispute, Moreland said, has centered on "how broadly or narrowly" to interpret that clause.

Judges, thus far, have found that Trump's policy is at odds with more than 150 years of precedent. The government has long given citizenship to any child born in the United States with few exceptions, such as babies born to foreign diplomats or foreign military members.  

"The balance of opinion for a long time has been on the side of saying that the 14th Amendment does have a right of birthright citizenship," Moreland said.