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.
However, in doing so, the Supreme Court struck a large blow against what’s become a go-to method for civil rights groups to push back against sweeping decrees from the White House.
“The question before us is whether the government is likely to suffer irreparable harm from the district courts’ entry of injunctions that likely exceed the authority conferred by the Judiciary Act. The answer to that question is yes,” Barrett wrote.
That means a district judge could exercise judicial power to block the federal government from targeting a particular person who sues — but that order likely can’t extend to an entire class of similar people who are similarly affected.
The Supreme Court 6-to-3 decision came down along political lines, with forceful concurrences from conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh.
In his concurring opinion, Kavanaugh wrote that the Supreme Court, “not the district courts or courts of appeals, will often still be the ultimate decisionmaker as to the interim legal status of major new federal statutes and executive actions.”
However, given the difficulties in getting the nation’s high court to take up new cases and the typically slow nature in its decision making, this also means that the biggest barrier holding back the Trump administration from exercising its most controversial actions is now effectively out of the way.
“District courts can no longer award preliminary nationwide or classwide relief except when such relief is legally authorized. And that salutary development will help bring substantially more order and discipline to the ubiquitous preliminary litigation over new federal statutes and executive actions,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by fellow liberal justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, excoriated the Trump administration in a dissent for “gamesmanship” to get its way without having to defend a policy several courts have already deemed blatantly unconstitutional.
“The government does not ask for complete stays of the injunctions, as it ordinarily does before this court. Why? The answer is obvious: To get such relief, the government would have to show that the order is likely constitutional, an impossible task in light of the Constitution’s text, history, this court’s precedents, federal law, and executive branch practice. So the government instead tries its hand at a different game. It asks this court to hold that, no matter how illegal a law or policy, courts can never simply tell the executive to stop enforcing it against anyone,” she wrote.
Jackson, writing in a separate dissent, blasted the majority’s opinion. “I view the demise of the notion that a federal judge can order the executive to adhere to the Constitution—full stop—as a sad day for America. The majority’s unpersuasive effort to justify this result makes it sadder still. It is the responsibility of each and every jurist to hold the line. But the court now requires judges to look the other way after finding that the executive is violating the law, shamefully permitting unlawful conduct to continue unabated. Today’s ruling thus surreptitiously stymies the judiciary’s core duty to protect and defend constitutional rights.”
The decision means that the Trump administration can — for now — move forward with Trump’s Day 1 executive order to withhold citizenship from any babies now born to undocumented parents. In her opinion, Barrett wrote that the order could not take effect for 30 days after the opinion’s release, effectively giving lawyers opposed to the order time to find new ways to oppose it.
State attorneys general challenging the policy have warned the policy would cause chaos at hospitals and create “stateless” persons lost in a two-tier system of unequal laws.
The presidential decree, which has been roundly criticized by liberal and conservative legal scholars, claims that the 14th Amendment “has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”
After rapidly and repeatedly losing in trial courts across the country that issued injunctions halting the measure, government lawyers had tried to salvage the policy by taking the matter straight up to the high court — while avoiding arguing the actual merits of the executive order and instead questioning the ability for trial judges to issue such nationwide injunctions.
Ahead of the court’s ruling, New Jersey state Attorney General Matthew Platkin, who challenged Trump’s executive order, told NOTUS that he was “optimistic” the Supreme Court would not side with the federal government.
“I don’t think there’s any way to administer this if it’s treated state-by state. I don’t know how we would possibly parse through the citizenship status of each child when they move from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, even Mississippi to Michigan to California, etc.,” Platkin said. “It’s an absurd result.”
“This particular act is, without question, unconstitutional and unlawful,” Platkin continued.
Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley explained in a statement how the decision will support the Republican mission to limit the kinds of intervention that has thus far been a go-to strategy for Democrats to resist the Trump administration.
“Universal injunctions are an unconstitutional afront to our nation’s system of checks and balances, and ought to be stopped for good,” he said, promising to use the “One Big Beautiful Bill” to further hamper those efforts.
—
Jose Pagliery and Oriana González are reporters at NOTUS.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the author of the lead dissent. It is Justice Sonia Sotomayor.