Trump Asks Supreme Court to Pause Injunction in Passport Case

The Trump administration Friday asked the US Supreme Court to block a federal district court’s nationwide class injunction that allows “passport applicants to self-select the sex designation on their passports.”

The stay application filed by Solicitor General D. John Sauer asks the Supreme Court to put the injunction on hold while the government challenges it in the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and perhaps at the high court.

When President Trump took office, he issued an executive order declaring that there are only two sexes and that they are immutable. He also required the State Department to issue passports based on the definition of “sex” in the executive order.

The government argues in the application that the district court’s injunction “has no basis in law or logic,” and private citizens can’t dictate that the government “use inaccurate sex designations on identification documents that fail to reflect the person’s biological sex.”

The injunction also injures the US “by compelling it to speak to foreign governments in contravention of both the President’s foreign policy and scientific reality,” the stay application says.

Citing United States v. Skrmetti, the government says it is likely to win on the merits of its claims. A policy doesn’t discriminate based on sex if it applies equally to each sex, it says. “And here, the challenged policy applies equally, regardless of sex—defining sex for everyone in terms of biology rather than self-identification.”

It was also rational to reject gender identity as a basis for identification in favor of a biological definition of sex—"one grounded in facts that are ‘immutable,’” the stay application says.

Jon Davidson, Senior Counsel for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, said that, as the lower court found, the “State Department’s policy is an unjustifiable and discriminatory action that restricts the essential rights of transgender, nonbinary, and intersex citizens.” He also condemned the administration’s escalating steps to limit transgender people’s rights, and said “we are committed to defending those rights including the freedom to travel safely.”

Covington & Burling LLP and the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation represent the plaintiffs.

The case is Trump v. Orr, U.S., No. 25A391, stay application filed 9/19/25.