By Ann E. Marimow
The Supreme Court on Friday backed President Donald Trump’s request to scale back lower-court orders that have for months blocked the administration’s ban on automatic citizenship for the U.S.-born babies of undocumented immigrants and foreign visitors, ruling that those nationwide injunctions went too far.
The 6-3 decision, with the liberal justices dissenting, largely strips federal judges of a powerful tool they have used to halt many of Trump’s policies nationwide, reshaping the judicial process when it comes to challenging executive action.
The ruling did not address the constitutionality of the president’s ban on birthright citizenship, which is a signature part of his immigration crackdown. The United States has long granted automatic citizenship to babies born in the United States when neither parent is a citizen or a permanent legal resident. Opponents of Trump’s ban say it conflicts with the 14th Amendment, past court rulings and the nation’s history.
The justices kept Trump’s ban on hold for at least 30 days and sent a set of cases back to the lower courts to determine the practical implications of their ruling. They left open a path for challengers to try to continue to block the president’s policy nationwide through class-action lawsuits but also raised the possibility that birthright citizenship could be cut off in the 28 states that have not joined lawsuits against it.
Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said nationwide injunctions likely exceed the power that Congress has granted to the federal courts. Judges, she said, must limit the relief they grant to the individuals and organizations who file lawsuits, in this case the states and pregnant noncitizens who challenged the policy.
“Some say that the universal injunction ‘give[s] the Judiciary a powerful tool to check the Executive Branch,’” Barrett wrote. “But federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them. When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”
For 20 minutes inside the courtroom, Justice Sonia Sotomayor read a summary of her dissent to emphasize strong disagreement with the opinion, which she called a “travesty of law” and warned would “cause chaos for the families of all affected children.” The high court’s conservative majority, she said, had ignored the unlawfulness of Trump’s citizenship ban and instead declared the president “generally free to enforce unquestionably unconstitutional policies against everyone except those who file suit.”
“That the court uses this case of all cases to review the question of universal injunctions is shameful,” said Sotomayor, who was joined in her written dissent by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “If there was ever a case where a universal injunction is appropriate, it is this one under every historical precedent.”
The ruling was one of five issued Friday, the final day of the Supreme Court term, and has implications for other cases in which judges have blocked the administration’s initiatives nationwide.
In a news conference, Trump celebrated the decision, saying “we can now promptly file to proceed with numerous policies that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis.”
In addition to birthright citizenship, Trump said the administration would seek to reopen cases that have limited his policies on ending funding to so-called sanctuary cities, which limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement efforts; suspending refugee resettlement, freezing “unnecessary” funding and preventing federal funds from being used for surgeries for transgender people.
“We have so many of them,” Trump said. “I have a whole list.”
Skye Perryman, president of the advocacy group Democracy Forward, said the ruling was disappointing, but its impact would not be nearly as sweeping as Trump suggested.
“There is a nuance and a narrow scope that the White House just ignored,” said Perryman, whose group has filed a number of lawsuits against the administration.
Conservative commentator Ed Whelan also said in his newsletter Friday that “at least in the short term, the ruling is probably going to accomplish much less than many people celebrating it realize.”
Twenty-two Democratic-led states, immigrant advocacy groups and pregnant women challenged Trump’s ban on birthright citizenship in federal courts in Massachusetts, Maryland and Washington State. Those cases will return to the judges who issued the injunctions. They must now reconsider, in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling, whether the states meet the justices’ new standard for obtaining broad relief.
The Supreme Court’s decision acknowledged, for instance, the argument from states challenging the ban, which says the harm it would create cannot not be fixed without a blanket order that applies nationwide – in part because children move across state lines or are born outside of their parents’ state of residence.
The majority left it to the lower courts to evaluate the states’ assertions and said the judges “should determine whether a narrower injunction is appropriate.”
In a statement, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown said the court’s ruling means “families across our country must continue to live with uncertainty about whether their children – born on U.S. soil – will be recognized as American citizens.”
But, he said, the decision leaves open the possibility of a new, far-reaching court order that Maryland and other challengers say is necessary to address the the president’s ban.
“This un-American executive order still will not go into effect immediately,” Brown said. “This fight is not over. We will continue to challenge this unlawful order – because justice demands it.”
Legal experts predicted a surge of new class-action lawsuits filed on behalf of groups of similarly situated people against the broad enforcement of Trump’s birthright citizenship ban.
Hours after the Supreme Court ruling was announced, the advocacy group CASA de Maryland and other organizations that had previously obtained a nationwide injunction rushed to a federal judge in Maryland with an amended lawsuit, seeking class-action status for every pregnant person or child born to families without permanent legal status, no matter where they live.
The American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations separately filed a nationwide class-action lawsuit in federal court in New Hampshire on behalf of babies born in the U.S. who would be denied citizenship under Trump’s order.
Presidents in both parties, members of Congress and several Supreme Court justices have long decried nationwide injunctions for giving outsized power to individual judges to halt a president’s agenda. The broad orders temporarily block a policy or regulation while litigation is underway if a judge believes the action may be unconstitutional or that implementing it would cause immediate harm. During the Biden administration, nationwide injunctions halted vaccine mandates, stimulus programs for farmers of color and immigration policies.
On Friday, Republican lawmakers celebrated the court’s ruling, calling it a significant step toward addressing a bipartisan problem.
“Universal injunctions are an unconstitutional affront to our nation’s system of checks and balances, and ought to be stopped for good,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a statement. “The Supreme Court has now affirmed that federal courts are overstepping in their use of universal injunctions, and the Department of Justice has a right to forcefully challenge such overreach.”
The ban is just one of the Trump administration’s initiatives to dramatically restrict illegal and legal immigration. Trump has barred the entry of travelers to the United States from more than a dozen countries and has taken steps to fast-track deportations of alleged gang members from Venezuela, suspend refugee admissions and remove legal protections for more than 530,000 migrants.
On his first day back in the White House, Trump signed an executive order to end automatic citizenship for the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants and foreign workers and visitors. Twenty-two states and immigrant advocacy groups sued, saying the order conflicts with the Constitution and past court rulings.
The 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, established citizenship for freed Black Americans as well as “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The citizenship clause reversed the Supreme Court’s infamous decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which had denied citizenship to Black Americans.
Trump and his allies say they can ban birthright citizenship because unauthorized immigrants are in the country without permanent legal status and, therefore, are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. government.
But most legal scholars, as well as the Democrat-led states and immigrant rights groups challenging the policy, say Trump’s argument would require a reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment – and conflicts with settled Supreme Court precedent that protects citizenship for most everyone born on U.S. soil, except for the children of foreign diplomats.
The Supreme Court upheld the guarantee of birthright citizenship in 1898, when it ruled that Wong Kim Ark, a child born in San Francisco, was a citizen even if his immigrant parents were “subjects of the Emperor of China.”
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Arelis R. Hernández, Tom Jackman and Justin Jouvenal contributed to this report.
