At least five conservative Supreme Court justices appeared ready to rule that President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship may go into effect by limiting how federal district courts can issue universal nationwide injunctions on executive branch policies.

The Trump administration brought this case to the Supreme Court after dozens of federal district courts issued nationwide injunctions blocking Trump’s executive order, which would deny birthright citizenship to any child born to noncitizen parents in the United States. Instead of challenging the underlying legality or constitutionality of Trump’s order, the administration asked the Supreme Court to rule on whether district courts can issue universal nationwide injunctions at all.

This procedural question dominated arguments on Thursday, and it appeared that a majority of conservatives agreed, at least somewhat, with the Trump administration’s arguments against universal nationwide injunctions. If the court were to accept such an argument, it would allow Trump’s executive order rewriting the rules of birthright citizenship to go into effect for everyone except for the individual plaintiffs who sued and won at federal district courts.

Such a decision could create a patchwork of citizenship throughout the country for the first time since the end of the Civil War and make it far more difficult for the children of noncitizens to bring suit to obtain the citizenship owed to them by birth under the Constitution.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued for the administration, making the case that courts may only grant relief to the plaintiffs who brought the suit. This argument would exclude non-parties who are in a similar situation but who did not join the suit outside of a class-action lawsuit, which carries with it greater challenges to obtain a certification of a common group of people as a class before the court.

The reason the administration brought this procedural and technical question to the court is because they are likely to lose on the merits. As four district courts have ruled, Trump’s executive order restricting the constitutional right to birthright citizenship is plainly unlawful.

“The argument here is that the president is violating not just one, but four established Supreme Court precedents,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, but that it may continue violating those precedents for anyone who doesn’t individually bring and win a case in court.

This creates a “catch-me-if-you-can” problem, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said, “where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights.”

But at least four conservative justices seemed more concerned with limiting universal nationwide injunction and showed less concern for how the administration could game the court system to continue denying citizenship to children born in the U.S. to noncitizens.

Justice Clarence Thomas limited his questions entirely to the origin and history of nationwide injunctions, clearly as an effort to prove that they are a modern invention without a history or tradition that traces to the founding.

Meanwhile, Chief Justice John Roberts repeatedly interjected to steer Sauer back to the questions of how the courts could readily handle this case absent nationwide injunctions when the liberal justices had him in a corner.

Allowing the government to deny citizenship to U.S.-born children of noncitizens while they seek individual relief from an unconstitutional act by the president is similar to requiring every individual gun owner to sue on their own if a president ordered the military to take all guns from U.S. citizens, Sotomayor argued.

Roberts jumped in to steer the conversation to more favorable territory. He noted that there are some situations, like voting rights or gerrymandering cases, where universal relief is a byproduct of the relief for the individual.

Again, after Justice Elena Kagan tried and failed to get Sauer to explain how his theory against universal relief would allow the Supreme Court to ever rule on the underlying merits of the order, Roberts jumped in to note that the courts can move quickly when necessary. Roberts noted the fast movement in the case surrounding the law requiring the sale of TikTok, although he failed to mention the consequentially slow movement in the Trump v. U.S. case.