The Supreme Court dramatically limited local federal judges’ power to halt powerful presidential actions nationwide — in effect forcing those trying to hold back White House policies to rethink their legal strategies.
The Friday opinion by Justice Amy Coney Barrett was on the surface about President Donald Trump’s executive order attempting to limit birthright citizenship. But the case zoomed beyond that order, focusing instead on federal judges’ ability to implement nationwide injunctions.
Writing for the conservative majority, Barrett reasoned that “the birthright citizenship issue is not before us.” And so, she went on to conclude that the Trump administration shouldn’t be held back — for now — from developing new federal rules about how to deny citizenship from babies born to undocumented immigrants and others covered by Trump’s Day 1 executive order reinterpreting the text of the Fourteenth Amendment.