The Trump administration had asked the justices to lift a nationwide pause on the policy as lower court challenges continue.
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.
The court agreed to hear arguments on those applications, which focus on whether lower court judges went too far in imposing a nationwide pause on the policy.
On President Trump’s first day in office, he issued the executive order ending birthright citizenship, the guarantee that a person born in the United States is automatically a citizen, for certain children.
President Trump told reporters on Thursday after hearing of the court’s decision to hold oral argument that he was “so happy.”
“The case has been so misunderstood,” he added. “That case, birthright citizenship, is about slavery,” he said without explaining his meaning.
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In a statement issued after the court’s announcement, Matthew J. Platkin, the New Jersey attorney general who is among those challenging the order, called the executive order “blatantly unconstitutional.”
“Birthright citizenship was enshrined in the Constitution in the wake of the Civil War, is backed by a long line of Supreme Court precedent and ensures that something as fundamental as American citizenship cannot be turned on or off at the whims of a single man,” Mr. Platkin said. “We look forward to presenting our arguments to the Supreme Court in May.”
Birthright citizenship has long been considered a central tenet of the United States. The 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, declares that “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.”
In 1898, the Supreme Court affirmed that right in a landmark case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, guaranteeing automatic citizenship for nearly all children born in the country. Since then, courts have upheld that expansive interpretation.
Some allies of Mr. Trump have argued that the 14th Amendment should never have been interpreted to give citizenship to everyone born in the country. Among them: John Eastman, a constitutional law scholar and former Supreme Court law clerk who was one of the architects of the scheme to create fake slates of pro-Trump electors in states that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won in the 2020 election.
A number of legal challenges followed Mr. Trump’s executive order, and federal courts in Massachusetts, Maryland and Washington State issued temporary injunctions that put the order on hold for the entire country while courts considered the challenges.
Those temporary blocks, called nationwide injunctions, have been hotly debated for years, and the Trump administration focused its request to the Supreme Court as a challenge to such orders.
In a brief to the justices, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that nationwide injunctions were a relatively recent phenomenon that had a “dramatic upsurge” during the first Trump administration “followed by an explosion in the last three months.” Mr. Sauer argued that those blocks on policies exceeded lower courts’ authority and “gravely encroach on the president’s executive power” under the Constitution.
“This court’s intervention is urgently needed to restore the constitutional balance of separated powers,” Mr. Sauer wrote.
Lawyers for those challenging the executive order urged the justices to reject the government’s argument.
In a brief filed on behalf of Washington State, Arizona and Oregon, lawyers called the focus on nationwide injunctions a “myopic request” that “fails this court’s rules for granting a stay.”
“Being directed to follow the law as it has been universally understood for over 125 years is not an emergency warranting the extraordinary remedy of a stay,” the brief from the group of states said.
