WASHINGTON >> The U.S. Supreme Court announced Thursday that it would hear arguments in a few weeks over President Donald 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 arguments on the government’s request to lift a nationwide pause on the Trump policy.

The justices announced they would defer any consideration of revoking 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 U.S.-born children of immigrants in the country without legal permission and foreign residents, will remain paused in every state while the court considers the case.

The policy, or the lower court ruling?

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 $1 billion 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 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.

Reactions

Trump told reporters Thursday after hearing of the court’s decision to hold oral arguments 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.

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,” Platkin said. “We look forward to presenting our arguments to the Supreme Court in May.”

A number of legal challenges followed 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.” 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,” Sauer wrote.