President Donald Trump issued a Day One executive order to clarify the meaning of "birthright citizenship" that was unsurprisingly challenged with multiple lawsuits and, just as predictably, was blocked from taking effect by nationwide injunctions imposed by three separate federal judges.

The Trump administration has now elevated the matter to the Supreme Court with an emergency plea for intervention in its favor, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The administration urged the justices to not only overturn or at least scale back the three lower court decisions but also to address and limit district court judges' increasingly prevalent use of nationwide or "universal" injunctions to halt the entire executive branch on a particular issue completely.

Trump's birthright citizenship order

Section 1, Clause 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states: "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."

The amendment was passed in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and was intended to impart citizenship to the newly freed slaves and their children, but over the decades has been more broadly interpreted to apply to any individual born on U.S. soil, including those born of parents residing in the U.S. illegally.

On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order that clarified the notion of "birthright citizenship" to exclude individuals born on U.S. soil of non-citizen parents who are residing in the country either illegally or only temporarily.

The key argument is that citizenship only applies to those who are "subject to the jurisdiction" of the U.S., which the administration contends doesn't include illegal aliens or short-term visitors.

Asking for intervention

Multiple lawsuits were filed in opposition to President Trump's order by nearly two dozen Democrat-led states along with several interest groups, and three federal judges in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Washington state all issued initial rulings against the administration with nationwide injunctions to block the order from implementation while litigation proceeds, according to the Journal.

Those three rulings were all appealed but the administration found no relief at the circuit court level, which prompted further appeals to the Supreme Court with emergency requests for intervention in the administration's favor.

SCOTUSblog reported that Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris filed three nearly identical applications that asked the high court to either overturn the injunctions or scale them back to only apply to the individual plaintiffs involved in the lawsuits.

For the suits involving states, that would include all residents of those states, but even that is questionable as the administration argued that the states suffer no harm from Trump's order and therefore lack any standing to bring the suits in the first place.

Limiting nationwide injunctions

As for the broad application of the nationwide injunctions, SCOTUSblog reported that Acting SG Harris also urged the Supreme Court to take action to limit the massive overreach of individual district judges who, if left unchecked, can bring the entire executive branch to a halt on a single issue during the preliminary stage of a legal dispute.

She argued in the filings that such injunctions "transgress constitutional limits on courts’ powers" and "compromise the Executive Branch’s ability to carry out its functions." She further asserted that the justices "should declare that enough is enough before district courts’ burgeoning reliance on universal injunctions becomes further entrenched."

It is unclear how the high court will ultimately rule on the matter of birthright citizenship -- the merits of which isn't even at issue at this stage of the process -- nor is it clear what they will decide on states' standing or limiting nationwide inunctions, though at least a few of the conservative-leaning justices have indicated their displeasure with such far-reaching orders in the past.