Since President Donald Trump’s first day back in office, Republicans in Congress have been desperate to gut federal judges’ power to block his administration’s unlawful executive orders, policies, and threats. On Friday, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority gave them what they wanted, further weakening the judiciary as an effective check on a White House that was already ignoring court orders with impunity.
“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” wrote liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent she read from the bench, calling the ruling “an attack on our system of law.”
The case stems from the Trump administration’s attempt to eliminate birthright citizenship via an executive order issued hours after Trump was sworn in. Three different district court judges quickly blocked the executive order as unconstitutional under both the text of the Constitution and more than a century of Supreme Court precedent.
Friday’s decision did not address the merits of the executive order, but instead how the judges went about ensuring the core constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. In a ruling written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Supreme Court’s six-member conservative wing drastically limited courts’ authority to issue injunctions even in the face of galling illegality affecting millions of people.
The three judges had issued a “universal” injunction against the birthright citizenship executive order, which meant the Trump administration could not enforce it anywhere in the country. A more limited injunction would have protected just the rights of the specific plaintiffs who sued — leaving the Trump regime free to target anyone who hadn’t gone to court themselves.
But from today forward, district courts can no longer issue nationwide injunctions, which conservatives gleefully sought and obtained during the Biden administration to block student loan forgiveness and other policies.
“Curiously, this same Supreme Court never thought to say all the injunctions it upheld and stays it granted against Biden administration actions were outside its power,” observed Stanford Law professor Mark Lemley on social media. “But now apparently they are.”
Instead, federal courts may only use injunctions to block presidents and their administrations from violating the rights of the specific parties that filed suit. In effect, judges will have no ability to offer immediate relief to however many people outside the courtroom are suffering from illegal actions of the executive branch. The ruling is certain to spur more class-action lawsuits against the federal government, which are still allowed but carry significant procedural hurdles and additional costs.
“Today’s ruling allows the Executive to deny people rights that the Founders plainly wrote into our Constitution, so long as those individuals have not found a lawyer or asked a court in a particular manner to have their rights protected,” wrote Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in a fiery dissent. Eliminating universal injunctions “requires judges to shrug and turn their backs to intermittent lawlessness,” Jackson wrote.
“This decision is devastating for U.S. families who are not protected by the limited injunction the Supreme Court left in place,” said Monica, a pregnant mother, asylum-seeker, and named plaintiff challenging the birthright citizenship executive order, in an emailed statement. “Hundreds of thousands of other U.S.-born children are in danger of not receiving U.S. citizenship. I know that every pregnant mother cannot file a lawsuit to make sure their children have U.S. citizenship — that is why I filed this lawsuit to not only protect my child’s rights, but the constitutional rights of all U.S.-born children of immigrants.”
The conservative supermajority framed the ruling as grounded in history and ancient principles about the limits of judicial authority. Jackson called this “legalese” a “smokescreen” that “obscures a far more basic question of enormous legal and practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?”
The court’s three liberal dissenters — Justices Elena Kagan, Jackson, and Sotomayor — framed the decision in catastrophic terms.
“Perhaps the degradation of our rule-of-law regime would happen anyway,” wrote Jackson. “But this Court’s complicity in the creation of a culture of disdain for lower courts, their rulings, and the law (as they interpret it) will surely hasten the downfall of our governing institutions, enabling our collective demise.”
Michael C. Dorf, a constitutional law professor at Cornell University, wrote that the conservative wing of the Supreme Court failed to recognize that the “current administration is a unique threat to the rule of law,” and that it was disastrous to remove such “a useful tool for the judiciary to constrain the president at this particular moment.”
“It empowers an administration of lawbreakers led by a convicted criminal and insurrectionist to further evade the law.”
“It’s such a threat because it empowers an administration of lawbreakers led by a convicted criminal and insurrectionist to further evade the law,” Dorf wrote.
The plaintiffs challenging the birthright citizenship order vowed to continue fighting the Trump administration. In one of the cases, the plaintiffs quickly filed a motion in Maryland district court to certify their lawsuit as a class action.
“Even without a universal injunction, we will continue to litigate this case to ensure that every child born in the United States receives the citizenship that the Fourteenth Amendment promises them, regardless of their parents’ immigration status,” said William Powell, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, in an emailed statement. “The Executive Order is unconstitutional, and nothing in the Supreme Court’s decision today calls that ultimate conclusion into question.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
