In a controversial decision, the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday sided with the Trump administration as it limited the power of federal judges to issue nationwide procedural rulings. The high court granted the administration’s request to scale back nationwide injunctions. It also partially green-lit, for now, a Trump policy that seeks to change who can be born American.
In a press conference after the ruling, President Donald Trump praised the court. The 6-3 decision – which divided the justices along ideological lines – is a “monumental victory” that is “based on common sense,” he said. He singled out Justice Amy Coney Barrett, one of his appointees and the author of the majority opinion, for writing a “brilliant” decision.
To supporters, Friday’s decision represents a common-sense effort to dial back the injunctions and judge-shopping that both parties have decried in recent years. For critics, it erodes constitutional protections and presents “an existential threat to the rule of law,” as one dissenting justice put it.
Why We Wrote This
To supporters, Friday’s decision represents a commonsense effort to dial back the injunctions that both parties have decried. For critics, it erodes constitutional protections and presents “an existential threat to the rule of law.”
The shape-shifting case has been litigated since late January, when Mr. Trump issued an executive order reinterpreting the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. But what began as a run-of-the-mill constitutional dispute morphed into an argument over the procedural powers of federal courts, specifically the power of District Courts to issue temporary relief affecting the entire country.
That judicial power now appears to be upended. Meanwhile, the question of whether President Trump can redefine birthright citizenship will continue to make its way through the courts. The executive order is now set to take temporary effect in 30 days, at least in the 28 states that have not sued the government.
Lower courts may further determine the extent of the rollout. Meanwhile, some immigrant advocates have already renewed their request to block the policy, by refiling their lawsuit as a class action. And with respect to nationwide injunctions, Justice Barrett included a caveat: One could be necessary to create “complete relief,” she wrote, directing lower courts to address that question.
“It is a major victory for the Trump administration, but it is qualified,” says Keith Bybee, director of the Institute for the Study of the Judiciary, Politics & the Media at Syracuse University. It’s “sort of an inside-out ruling” from the court, he adds.
Most people want to know whether the president can take away automatic citizenship, he continues, but “The court’s saying, ‘That’s not the question we’re going to answer.’” Instead, the court opted to address how to scale back judicial authority.
But by allowing a potential patchwork of policy rollouts across the country, says Professor Bybee, “The court has now created the conditions for some significant disorder.”
“The bottom line” on injunctions
The case, Trump v. CASA Inc., followed a rare path to the high court.
Earlier this year, multiple federal district and appeals courts ruled that Mr. Trump’s executive order redefining birthright citizenship is likely unconstitutional. Normally, the government would then ask the Supreme Court to overturn those rulings. Instead, the Trump administration asked the justices to narrow the nationwide injunctions.
The White House has argued for months that federal judges have been abusing their power by issuing rulings temporarily blocking its aggressive immigration policies. With mixed results, the administration has asked the Supreme Court to unfreeze certain policies. Mr. Trump notched a victory Monday, as the court approved “third country” deportations despite immigrants advocates’ due process concerns.
On Friday, the justices limited lower courts’ ability to issue far-reaching injunctions.
“The issuance of a universal injunction can be justified only as an exercise of equitable authority, yet Congress has granted federal courts no such power,” wrote Justice Barrett in the majority opinion. “Equitable authority” refers to the flexibility courts have in coming up with fair remedies to injustices. While courts have broad discretion to determine those remedies, they also have limits.
“Though flexible, this equitable authority is not freewheeling,” she wrote.
And “the bottom line,” she added, is that the “universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our Nation’s history.”
That procedural tool can act as an advantage to the party that does not control the executive branch, because it can try to wield injunctions to stymie executive actions, says Professor Bybee.
“But if you are not confident that your party will always control it, then you should be kind of limited in your criticism of universal junctions,” he says. “Because you may come to rely on them in the near future.”
The three liberal justices were blistering in their dissents. Friday’s decision, rather than a measured partial stay, represents “an existential threat to the rule of law,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote.
“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who read her dissent from the bench. “Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship.”
The majority of the court “got it right,” says Paul Larkin, the Rumpel senior legal research fellow at The Heritage Foundation. The public’s views on birthright citizenship as a “hot-button issue,” he says, “seem to have overcome their views on the sort of structural or procedural issue that was involved in this case.”
The constitutionality of the Trump order can still wend its way through courts, he says. “You can get these issues resolved – it’s just that you can’t do it in a New York second.”
It’s true that courts can still stop enforcement of the birthright citizenship order, which remains unconstitutional, says Alicia Bannon, director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center for Justice. But “The court did limit a very important tool that the judiciary has to address illegal activities.”
“There was no reason for [the Supreme Court] to take this case up now,” says Ms. Bannon, who notes that courts have issued universal injunctions for decades.
Specific to the injunctions at issue in the birthright citizenship case, Justice Barrett offered focused guidance to the lower courts. They are stayed “only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue,” she wrote.
Lower courts in Washington, Massachusetts, and Maryland – to which these cases will now return – “shall move expeditiously to ensure that, with respect to each plaintiff, the injunctions comport with this rule.”
How to define birthright citizenship?
Since the end of the Civil War, birthright citizenship has been a constitutional guarantee for virtually everyone born in the U.S. The 14th Amendment grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” A Supreme Court case decided in 1898 affirmed that this right applies to U.S.-born children of noncitizens.
Modern legal theories challenging this tradition have emerged since the 1980s. Related Republican-led bills have failed in Congress. These theories essentially hold that the language “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excludes the children of parents who are in the country unlawfully.
President Trump’s executive order would make those theories a reality. The Jan. 20 order says children of parents here unlawfully or temporarily (such as on a visa) are excluded from automatic U.S. citizenship.
Lawsuits against the government quickly followed, and Trump v. CASA is actually three cases combined. The plaintiffs – pregnant immigrants, immigrant advocacy groups, and 22 states – won overlapping, nationwide injunctions from three federal District Courts. Those judges found the Trump order likely unconstitutional, and their rulings were affirmed by three appellate courts.
In what it called a “modest” request, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to narrow the injunctions to apply only to the plaintiffs – instead of to the whole country. The Trump administration argued that it was unable to create “public guidance about how [executive agencies] would implement” the birthright order because of the nationwide injunctions.
The administration did not argue that Mr. Trump’s birthright citizenship order is constitutional, and the six-justice majority on Friday did not comment on that question. In the principal dissent, Justice Sotomayor addressed that elephant in the room.
“The majority ignores entirely whether the President’s Executive Order is constitutional,” she wrote.
The government says “It should be able to apply the Citizenship Order (whose legality it does not defend) to everyone except the plaintiffs who filed this lawsuit,” she added. “The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the Government makes no attempt to hide it. Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along.”
Rise of class actions?
With lower courts’ authority to issue nationwide injunctions now drastically curbed, the Supreme Court identified one prominent alternative: nationwide class actions. Such class actions, governed by Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, require plaintiffs to clear more procedural hurdles than in seeking a nationwide injunction.
This difficulty, the majority wrote, is exactly the point. “By forging a shortcut to relief that benefits parties and nonparties alike, universal injunctions impermissibly circumvent Rule 23’s procedural protections,” wrote Justice Barrett.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito cautioned that lower courts should maintain those strict procedures governing certification of nationwide class actions.
Without “scrupulous adherence” to those requirements, he wrote, “the universal injunction will return from the grave under the guise of ‘nationwide class relief.’”
Within hours of Friday’s decision, immigrant groups in Maryland and New Hampshire sought to refile their cases as class actions that would prevent the government from enforcing the birthright citizenship order against any member of the class anywhere in the country.
