The Supreme Court takes up birthright citizenship, sort of.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Today's read: 15 minutes.

Congrats to my wife.

Almost three years ago, I wrote a Friday edition about my wife, Phoebe. She had upended her career and decided to go to law school — choosing an incredibly hard and atypical path in order to pursue a career that meant something to her. Well, this week, she completed another chapter in that journey: She finished law school. She didn’t just finish, but she completed half of her final year pregnant and the other half as a new mother; she managed straight As, and will graduate with honors. 

I have the great privilege of doing my work publicly, which means when I write a good piece or do my job well, I tend to get positive feedback. Some people, like her, do a much harder thing: They complete their work in solitude, with little more than their own motivation and discipline to get them through tough times. What she did these last three years was simply remarkable, and I just wanted to say it somewhere. So, Phoebe: Congrats. I’m proud of you. I love you. And as scared as I am of you being a lawyer (I’ll never win an argument again, not that I ever did), I can’t wait to see what you do next.

Quick hits.

1. Following a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump said Russia and Ukraine would immediately begin ceasefire negotiations. Russia did not offer a timeframe for starting talks. (The call)
2. The Supreme Court paused a federal judge’s ruling that had blocked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from ending the temporary protected status of over 300,000 Venezuelans living in the United States, clearing the way for their potential removal. (The ruling) Separately, the Department of Homeland Security conducted its first deportation flight for migrants who accepted the government’s offer of $1,000 to leave the country voluntarily. (The flight)
3. The Justice Department charged Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) with assaulting, resisting, and impeding law-enforcement officers during a confrontation outside an immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, earlier this month. (The charges)
4. Israel permitted aid trucks to enter Gaza for the first time in nearly three months. Shortly afterward, the United Kingdom, France, and Canada issued a joint statement calling the aid “wholly inadequate” and warning of potential “concrete actions” against Israel. (The latest)
5. The Trump administration has reportedly agreed to pay approximately $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt, who was killed by a police officer while taking part in the January 6 Capitol riot, to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit. (The settlement)

Today's topic.

Birthright citizenship. On Thursday, the Supreme Court heard arguments on whether to lift or narrow a series of lower-court injunctions blocking the Trump administration from enforcing an executive order banning birthright citizenship. The arguments primarily focused on the constitutionality of federal judges issuing universal injunctions, which bar a specific law or policy nationwide, and did not engage the merits of the order itself. The court is expected to issue a decision in late June or early July. 

Back up: On his first day back in office, President Trump signed an executive order ending the automatic extension of citizenship for children born in the United States to parents who are not legal permanent residents. The order was scheduled to take effect after February 19, but it was quickly blocked by a U.S. district judge, who called it “blatantly unconstitutional.” District court judges in several other states also issued nationwide injunctions blocking the order, preventing it from being enforced even in states not involved in the challenge. 

After appeals courts declined the government’s requests to lift or narrow the injunctions, the Trump administration brought the case to the Supreme Court, which expedited the case through its emergency docket. 

We covered the history of birthright citizenship in the U.S. and President Trump’s proposal to end the practice in December 2024.

During Thursday’s arguments, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer characterized nationwide injunctions as a “bipartisan problem” spanning the last five presidential administrations. “Such injunctions prevent the percolation of novel and difficult legal questions. They encourage rampant forum shopping. They require judges to make rushed, high-stakes, low-information decisions,” Sauer said. New Jersey Solicitor General Jeremy Feigenbaum, who is representing the states challenging the executive order, agreed that nationwide injunctions can be “reserved for narrow circumstances” but are necessary in this case to provide effective relief due to practical problems — like citizenship toggling on and off over state lines — that would arise from a regional denial of birthright citizenship. 

Some Republican-appointed justices seemed partial to Sauer’s argument, with Justice Clarence Thomas remarking, “We survived until the 1960s without universal injunctions.” Justice Samuel Alito also suggested that federal judges had too much power to freeze executive actions nationwide. Separately, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked Sauer about whether the Trump administration would follow district court rulings it disagreed with. Sauer responded, “Our general practice is to respect those precedents, but there are circumstances when it is not a categorical practice.”

Democrat-appointed justices raised concerns about the consequences of curtailing nationwide injunctions. “You’re going to have individual by individual by individual, and all of those individuals are going to win, and the ones who can't afford to go to court, they're the ones who are going to lose,” Justice Elena Kagan said. Justice Sonia Sotomayor also remarked that granting the Trump administration’s request would limit federal courts’ ability to curb clear constitutional violations except through individual lawsuits. 

Today, we’ll break down the arguments presented to the court, with perspectives from the left and right. Then, my take.

What the left is saying.

• The left concedes some flaws with judges’ injunction power but argues it was properly used in this case.
• Some say the Trump administration was ill prepared to defend its stance.
• Others argue nationwide injunctions are appropriate in cases where the president has clearly overstepped his authority. 

In The New Yorker, Ruth Marcus explored “the stakes of the birthright-citizenship case.”

“Thursday’s arguments… weren’t really about birthright citizenship; the Trump Administration could have pressed the Justices to tackle that issue, but it chose not to. Instead, the unusual mid-May session, after regular oral arguments had finished for the term, focused on the technical matter of injunctions. That is an issue on which the Administration has a far stronger argument,” Marcus wrote. “Nationwide injunctions have been around for years but didn’t become a regular occurrence until 2015. Back then, they were a thorn in the side of a Democratic Administration, as Texas challenged Barack Obama’s executive order granting legal protections to Dreamers.”

“But although there are legitimate questions about whether lower-court judges have overstepped, there are also, as Thursday’s arguments illustrated, situations in which broad injunctions may be necessary. And birthright citizenship is particularly ill-suited as a vehicle for curbing them,” Marcus said. “Citizenship is, by definition, a national issue. It makes little sense to have a patchwork nation in which, while the question wends its way through the courts, children born in one state are citizens and those born in another are not.”

In The Atlantic, Amanda Frost wrote about “the question the Trump administration couldn’t answer about birthright citizenship.”

“Forty-six minutes into the Supreme Court’s oral argument in the birthright-citizenship litigation, Solicitor General D. John Sauer got a question he couldn’t answer… Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, wanted to know how, exactly, the government would administer a rule denying citizenship to potentially hundreds of thousands of babies every year,” Frost said. “‘We don’t know,’ Sauer candidly told the Court… Really? With this one exchange, Sauer inadvertently revealed why nationwide injunctions are at times the only way to protect the public. The administration has no workable plan for its unconstitutional order, yet it wants to take away the best legal pathway for those affected to challenge the government’s action.”

“The government is right that nationwide injunctions come with real costs to any presidential administration. They encourage forum-shopping, leading to a pattern whereby red-state judges blocked President Joe Biden’s policies and blue-state judges block Trump’s. They put pressure on the Supreme Court to decide cases quickly and at an early stage of the litigation,” Frost wrote. “Yet these injunctions are also essential in at least some cases, such as when a patchwork implementation of a law proves unworkable. That is the case here… Under such a system, pregnant women would be motivated to cross state borders to give birth—a bizarre variation on ‘birth tourism’ incompatible with the fact that the United States is a single nation.”

In The Los Angeles Times, Erwin Chemerinsky asked “how much power to stop the president should federal judges have?”

“Consider what an end to nationwide injunctions would mean: A challenge to a government policy would have to be brought separately in each of 94 federal districts and ultimately be heard in every federal circuit court. It would create inconsistent laws — in the case of citizenship, a person born to immigrant parents in one federal district would be a citizen, while one born in identical circumstances in another district would not be — at least until, and unless, the Supreme Court resolved the issue for the entire country,” Chemerinsky said. “The president’s primary argument is that nationwide injunctions prevent the executive branch from carrying out its constitutional duties. But as Justice Elena Kagan pointed out, if the president is violating the Constitution, his action should be stopped.”

“The three more moderate conservatives — Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett — did not tip their hand. Some of their questions suggested that they might look for a compromise that would maintain nationwide injunctions but impose new limits on when they can be used,” Chemerinsky wrote. “In his first months in office, Trump has issued a flurry of blatantly illegal and unconstitutional executive orders. The federal courts are the only way to check these orders and uphold the rule of law. This is not the time for the Supreme Court to greatly weaken the ability of the federal judiciary to stop illegal presidential acts.”

What the right is saying.

• The right says the court should limit the use of nationwide injunctions, and many argue Congress should also take up the issue.
• Some worry that the narrow scope of the case won’t stop judges from inhibiting Trump’s agenda.
• Others say the case reflects the growing conflicts between the executive and judicial branches. 

National Review’s editors said “it’s time to rein in nationwide injunctions.”

“The Trump administration has been ensnared in a Lilliputian thicket of nationwide injunctions almost since the moment that Donald Trump was sworn in and began issuing executive orders… Trump and others in his administration have tried slicing through these knots rather than putting in the legal work to untie them,” the editors wrote. “While the volume of orders binding Trump has been unprecedented, nationwide injunctions by individual judges in sympathetic locales have bedeviled the last two Democratic presidents as well. We think the better answer, however, is for both the Court and Congress to place limitations on the use of nationwide injunctions rather than abolish them entirely.

“Congress should play the leading role in that process. We can hardly think of a better test case for reviving the national legislature’s capacity to enact bipartisan legislation that improves the functioning of the federal government while fortifying its respect for individual rights and the rule of written law,” the editors said. “After all, judicial activists hamstringing the executive’s power to govern is bad, but it is also destructive for the executive branch to arrogate powers belonging to Congress or the courts, trample constitutional rights, and rule by presidential fiat or unaccountable bureaucratic dictate. The past decade and a half have not been short on examples of all of these abuses, for which the intervention of the courts has been an essential check on an overgrown executive and administrative state.”

In The Federalist, Margot Cleveland suggested “even if SCOTUS gives Trump a win on birthright citizenship, it will not end partisan lawfare.”

“While President Trump seems assured of scoring a victory from the Supreme Court in these cases, a win will do little to stop the lower courts from continuing to flood the country with nationwide injunctions interfering with the Trump Administration’s execution of its American-first agenda,” Cleveland wrote. “The reason why is simple: The issue before the Supreme Court is narrow and does not concern the propriety of nationwide injunctions in cases brought under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). And the majority of nationwide injunctions entered against the Trump Administration since the president returned to Washington came in cases challenging decisions under the APA.”

“While it seems likely, then, that the Supreme Court will limit the scope of the injunctions in the birthright citizenship cases, that will not put an end to nationwide injunctions because many of the nationwide injunctions making news since Trump began his second term came about from challenges brought under the APA,” Cleveland said. “Until the Supreme Court reins in the lower courts’ misuse of the APA, then, the abuse of nationwide injunctions will continue — even if the Trump Administration prevails in the birthright citizenship cases.”

In The Washington Post, Jason Willick wrote “the Supreme Court grapples with post-congressional politics.”

“Trump has put federal departments and agencies on a tight leash, consolidating more of the executive power in the White House. If the Supreme Court restricts nationwide injunctions, it will be making a parallel change in the judicial branch. By reserving for themselves the authority to block presidential policies, the justices will be consolidating more of the Constitution’s judicial power in their palace on First Street,” Willick said. “That could be a necessary adjustment. In the new age of presidentialism, only the Supreme Court has the political legitimacy to definitively block the executive. But there’s a risk that this check will also erode over time: The Trump administration has already gone up to the line of ignoring Supreme Court opinions in two immigration cases.”

“Traditionally, the focal point of U.S. politics has been in the elected branches — the presidency and Congress. Now it has shifted away from Congress and toward the courts. There are various ideas for restoring Congress’s centrality: paring back the Senate filibuster, enlarging the House of Representatives, or raising the salaries of members of Congress or their staff to attract more talent,” Willick wrote. “But procedural changes are rarely a panacea. The Supreme Court will be swamped by executive actions in this administration and subsequent ones until something happens in U.S. politics to break the cycle of presidential aggrandizement and judicial reaction.”

My take.

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• The Trump administration is picking a different fight because it knows it will lose the birthright citizenship case on the merits.
• I feel quite torn about the now-regular use of nationwide injunctions, and am sympathetic to both sides of the argument.
• It’s anyone’s guess what the court does now.

The Trump administration knows it will lose the birthright citizenship case on the merits, so it is avoiding that fight altogether. 

That simple reality — that the administration is basically finding a way not to argue the real case here — is perpetually lost in all the noise. Both this strategy from the administration and the fact that we are all getting distracted by the other arguments are so frustrating to me that I am going to repeat this over and over today, just to make the most salient detail as clear as I possibly can: The Trump administration knows it will lose the birthright citizenship case on the merits, so it is avoiding that fight altogether. 

Although the administration’s reasoning isn’t entirely clear, it is reasonable to believe that the government’s lawyers aren’t trying to win its birthright citizenship case (because it can’t), but instead are trying to limit nationwide injunctions as a way to broaden Trump’s ability to pursue his agenda through executive power. Adam Liptak at The New York Times speculated that the Justice Department is exercising what lawyers call “client management,” appeasing President Trump by picking a somewhat related, smaller, and winnable battle.

That strategy could work. While none of the justices seem particularly eager to end birthright citizenship (nearly every hypothetical in oral arguments was prefaced with some variation of “let’s assume this order is totally unlawful”), many of them have also criticized nationwide injunctions, which gave the Trump administration an opening to limit the ways courts have stymied its agenda. And, as almost every writer we quote today says in one way or another, the issue is very real and important — though I’m personally torn about how to best handle it.

On the one hand, a single federal judge having the power to indefinitely halt the workings of the executive branch seems like a systemic flaw. An administration could exercise its power in a way that 95% of the federal judges in the country approve of, but still have its agenda halted by anyone who can get their case before a single federal judge in the other 5%. Through even a fast and orderly appeals process, this kind of injunction could hold up straightforwardly defensible policies for a year or two, or more. This isn’t just a hypothetical; it’s already happening.

On the other hand, barring all nationwide injunctions would open the door to authoritarian executive action and all kinds of legal trickery that could invite lawless presidencies. For example, Justice Sotomayor, plucking at conservative heart strings, floated the possibility of a president ordering the military to seize everyone’s firearms. Was the administration really arguing that a federal judge should not be able to block such an action? And would citizens who lost their firearms have to wait until their individual case made its way to the Supreme Court? 

Or, alternatively, imagine the Trump administration has its executive order on birthright citizenship halted by a federal judge (as has already happened), but federal judges could only block the order from applying specifically to the plaintiffs who challenged it — not to everyone. That would mean the order would exist in a kind of legal limbo where it applied to everyone except the plaintiffs who challenged it. Then, if the administration thought it were going to lose the case at the Supreme Court, and no nationwide injunction could stop them from applying the order broadly, it could simply opt to never challenge the federal judge's ruling and just keep pursuing an end to birthright citizenship.

How do we know an administration would or could do that? Well, the administration is doing that right now — because the administration knows it will lose the birthright citizenship case on the merits. What’s more, Solicitor General D. John Sauer indicated to the court that it would “generally” — but not always — follow appellate decisions, signaling its willingness to just ignore court orders until it got one from the Supreme Court.

Solicitor General Sauer offered that response to a line of inquiry from Justice Barrett, which was one of the most headscratching moments of oral arguments. The solicitor general is sometimes called the “10th justice” because they are expected to act almost like a member of the court — to be forthright, fair, and honest. To be collegial. Sauer, however, has been at times evasive and even confrontational with the justices; if you listen to Barrett’s exchange with Sauer, you can hear her frustration bubbling to the surface. 

Yesterday, for an upcoming episode of the Tangle podcast, I discussed this case (and other legal questions) with Dispatch Senior Editor and legal expert Sarah Isgur. Isgur has known Sauer since her first year of law school, and she told me that 1) Sauer is a brilliant lawyer, so he — more than anyone else — knows when he is being an irritant. 2) This is “definitely a strategy,” and similar to one he took when arguing Trump’s immunity case, which resulted in a partial victory. And 3) Sauer is probably hoping to stake out an unrealistic position so that an eventual compromise could end up a little closer to what he actually wants.

As for what’s going to happen next: It’s often easy to speculate about where the court is going to land, but in this case it is truly anyone’s guess. Many of the justices seem open to limiting nationwide injunctions in some way, and my best prediction is that the court will create a new test (as they love to do) that dictates when a nationwide injunction is appropriate. When I asked Isgur, she seemed to agree. She said the “Vegas odds” were that the court would find some compromise, trimming the circumstances where you can issue a nationwide injunction and creating a kind of three-or-four-factor test. However, she also noted that Amy Howe — the expert court watcher behind SCOTUSblog — thought the court could actually weigh in on the merits of birthright citizenship instead. Liptak, the New York Times Supreme Court reporter, floated this too: He reasoned there was a 20% chance of the court ignoring the nationwide injunction question altogether and forcing an argument on the merits of the executive order. 

Again, what actually happens here is truly anyone’s guess. The Trump administration’s options for pushing forward are limited because — for the last time — it knows it will lose the birthright citizenship case on the merits, so it is avoiding that fight altogether. The justices' options are limited because they seem genuinely interested in considering the problem of nationwide injunctions, although they are aligned on using one for this case and slightly annoyed by the administration’s arguments. None of this is setting us up for a clean or straightforward ruling. 

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Your questions, answered.

Q: Are we approaching a time that we can never trust what we see and read on the internet due to artificial intelligence/machine learning?

— Cavan from Mississippi

Tangle: Yes. In fact, you could probably say we’ve long passed the point that you can trust what you see or read on the internet. Anyone can use digital tools to spin up a fake testimonial, spoof an article, or even alter a video. But I have two caveats that can really help to frame why that isn’t as apocalyptic a statement as it may seem.

First, saying “you can’t trust everything on the internet” and “you can’t trust anything on the internet” are very different things, and I really only want to argue for the first statement. Of course, you still have to go through the process of evaluating a source — by comparing it to what other outlets (from multiple perspectives) are writing, talking to friends and family you trust, and comparing what it says to the things you can see or hear for yourself. Then, you have to validate that what you’re reading or watching is actually from that source and not altered or misrepresented in some way (social media is infamous for doing this). As long as you remain healthily skeptical, you can definitely trust most of what the sources you can validate and vouch for are saying.

Second, get comfortable with being skeptical in general. We like to remind people that throughout the grand sweep of human history, the time period where you could point to hard photographic or video evidence as incontrovertible proof for anything is actually pretty small — only about 200 years — if not nonexistent. Hucksters and hoaxers have always existed, but they’ve always been a step behind intelligent fact-checkers, and they probably always will be.

So, no, don’t trust everything on the internet. But don’t dismiss everything, either. Considering multiple facets and keeping an open mind about what could be true is not only an essential adaptation to a post-AI world, but that has also been the status quo for thousands of yearss.

Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.

Under the radar.

According to internal documents at the Social Security Administration (SSA), over-the-phone anti-fraud checks for benefit claims that were installed in April have only found two cases with a high probability of being fraudulent. The agency has fielded approximately 110,000 such claims since the checks were installed, and reported less than 1% of claims as potentially fraudulent. However, the checks have slowed retirement claim processing by 25%, and SSA now has more than 140,000 unprocessed retirement claims that are over 60 days old. The findings offer a stark contrast to claims from Elon Musk and engineers at the Department of Government Efficiency that bad actors were frequently defrauding the SSA through its phone systems. Nextgov has the story.

Numbers.

• 28% and 53%. The percentage of Americans who say they support and oppose ending birthright citizenship, respectively, according to a May 2025 NPR/Ipsos poll.
• 11% and 79%. The percentage of Democrats who say they support and oppose ending birthright citizenship, respectively.
• 48% and 34%. The percentage of Republicans who say they support and oppose ending birthright citizenship, respectively.
• 255,000. The estimated number of babies born in the U.S. each year who would not be granted citizenship under the executive order, according to a May 2025 report from the Migration Policy Institute. 
• 6. The number of nationwide injunctions issued against President George W. Bush’s administration’s policies. 
• 12. The number of nationwide injunctions issued against President Barack Obama’s administration’s policies. 
• 64. The number of nationwide injunctions issued against President Donald Trump’s first administration’s policies. 
• 14. The number of nationwide injunctions issued against President Joe Biden’s administration’s policies through 2023. 

The extras.

• One year ago today we covered the Samuel Alito flag controversy.
• The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was the kindergartener who distributed Jell-O shots.
• Nothing to do with politics: Ice-age humans tailored form-fitting clothing from reindeer pelts.
• Yesterday’s survey: 3,444 readers answered our survey on Joe Biden’s fitness while in office with 61% saying the recent reports confirmed concerns they already had. “He was visibly diminished. The heat you got for calling it out was not because you were wrong, it was because you were right. Everyone could see it. I saw it and was still going to vote for him. That is why you got dragged, we all saw it, we didn’t want you saying it out loud,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

Collapses in bee colonies have increased recently, threatening food supplies reliant on bee pollination. However, a study published in April successfully trialed a solution to this issue: a new food source to sustain nutritionally stressed colonies. The new source resembles dry pet food, and it is packed with the nutrients bees need. As the tested colonies continue to thrive, the innovation is expected to become a key ingredient to combating colony collapse. Washington State University has the story.

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