A group of Haitian nationals urged the Supreme Court on Monday to leave in place a ruling by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., that allows them to stay in the United States for the time being because of unsafe conditions in their home country. Since returning to office last year, the Trump administration has sought to end deportation protections for several countries, including Venezuela, Ethiopia, and South Sudan. In a 40-page filing, the Haitian nationals told the justices that they will “suffer irreparable—potentially fatal—injury” if that ruling is put on hold because they could be deported immediately to Haiti, which they described as “‘a maelstrom of disease, poverty, violence (including sexual violence) and death.’”

Updated on March 13 at 4:40 p.m.

Welcome to our SCOTUS Innovators series, a new recurring column on people who have shaped our understanding of the Supreme Court.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to chat with Jerry Goldman (a fellow Northwestern alum), founder of the Oyez project. For those unfamiliar with Oyez, this website was the first to digitize and share thousands of hours of Supreme Court oral arguments and opinion announcements, making it far easier for legal scholars and the public to engage with the court.

During a roundtable at the White House on Friday, March 6, President Donald Trump returned to what has become a familiar refrain in the weeks since the Supreme Court struck down his signature tariffs: He railed against the justices for interfering with his policy plans, accusing the court of harming the country. “I think the Supreme Court ought to be ashamed of itself for a lot of reasons, ok?,” the president said. “They have hurt this country so badly because they haven’t had the guts to do what’s right.”

The Trump administration on Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to pause a ruling by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., that barred the government from ending a program that allows Haitians to remain in the United States temporarily. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer also asked the justices to take up the merits of the case, as well as a similar one already before them involving Syria, without waiting for a federal appeals court to weigh in. “The issues that” the government’s application “presents are … common among the numerous challenges to” efforts to terminate the program for a variety of countries, “have been ventilated in litigation across the country, and cry out for immediate resolution,” Sauer wrote.

Critics and supporters of President Donald Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship often focus on the order’s barring of automatic citizenship to children born to individuals unlawfully present in the United States. In this column, I would instead like to focus on the order’s barring of such citizenship to children born to individuals lawfully but transiently present in the United States, because the order’s treatment of those children brings the dispute into sharp focus. One side argues that the 14th Amendment effectively codifies the English common law of subjectship to declare that the children of foreign visitors are birthright citizens. The other side argues that the 14th Amendment instead codifies an American rule of declaring as citizens those who have chosen to make this country their home. The latter view is the better one.