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What to know:
- What’s the status of birthright citizenship? That’s unclear. Trump’s order aims to deny citizenship to U.S.-born children of people who are in the country illegally. The court’s conservative majority left open the possibility that the birthright citizenship changes could remain blocked nationwide.
- What does the ruling mean for Trump? The court’s ruling on injunctions was a victory for the president, who has complained about individual judges throwing up obstacles to his agenda. “It’s a giant,” Trump said of the ruling. Though different in magnitude, nationwide injunctions hampered former President Joe Biden’s administration as well.
- What happens next? The president said he would try to advance restrictions on birthright citizenship and other policies that had been blocked by district courts. One of the groups that challenged Trump’s order quickly went back to court seeking to keep his new restrictions on birthright citizenship at bay.
- What else did the court decide? The court sided with Maryland parents with religious objections to school book material, preserved a key part of an Obamacare coverage requirement, upheld a law aimed at blocking kids from seeing pornography online, and maintained a fee subsidizing phone and internet services in schools, libraries, and rural areas.
On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court limited federal judges' authority to issue nationwide injunctions, a decision that handed President Trump a victory in his battles with the judiciary but left uncertain the fate of his push to curtail birthright citizenship.
The 6-3 decision written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett faulted lower courts for granting universal injunctions that blocked Trump’s policy across the U.S. The court said that because such orders go beyond providing relief to the plaintiffs, they “likely exceed” the authority Congress gave to district judges.
Barrett, however, left open the possibility that Trump’s birthright policy could be blocked nationwide under lawsuits brought by New Jersey and other Democratic-led states, in contrast to companion cases filed by pregnant women concerned about their future children’s status. The states contend that a patchwork of citizenship rights based on where in the U.S. a child is born would be impossible for them to administer, and Friday’s decision directed lower courts to consider such arguments.
Coming at a preliminary stage of the litigation, the decision didn’t resolve the underlying legality of Trump’s policy. The court said Trump’s birthright-citizenship order wouldn’t take effect for 30 days, a time frame that likely will give judges another chance to craft injunctions against the White House based on the high court’s guidance.
The ruling nevertheless provided a broad boost for Trump’s aggressive second-term agenda, which has attracted hundreds of lawsuits already. Judges in more than two dozen instances have put his policies on hold nationwide. The majority’s opinion echoed the criticism Trump officials have levied at federal judges who enjoined policies they found unlawful.
“Federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them,” Barrett wrote, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. “When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”
Trump’s birthright-citizenship order is one of his most controversial. Signed in January on Inauguration Day, it denies citizenship to children born in the U.S. unless one of their parents was a citizen or permanent legal resident.
In a White House press conference, Trump said his administration could now move forward with this and other policies that had been blocked by district judges, including efforts to cancel grants for so-called sanctuary cities, suspend a refugee-resettlement program, and eliminate funding for medical procedures for transgender people.
“This morning, the Supreme Court has delivered a monumental victory for the Constitution, the separation of powers and the rule of law,” Trump said, offering his gratitude to the court for “stepping in and solving this very, very big and complex problem.”
In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the majority bent over backward to accommodate the Trump administration, discarding legal principles that have applied for generations.
Friday’s decision “is nothing less than an open invitation for the Government to bypass the Constitution. The Executive Branch can now enforce policies that flout settled law and violate countless individuals’ constitutional rights, and the federal courts will be hamstrung to stop its actions fully,” she wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The challengers argued the president’s action violated the 14th Amendment, which declares that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” For more than a century, the text has been understood to grant citizenship at birth to all but the children of foreign diplomats.
Trump argues the 14th Amendment was ratified to guarantee citizenship only to Black Americans newly freed from slavery, not to the children of illegal immigrants or temporary visitors to the U.S.
New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, who led a coalition of blue states fighting the birthright order, said he was confident that his case, at least, would qualify for a universal injunction. “The president’s approach to birthright citizenship is a recipe for chaos on the ground and harm to the States,” Platkin said. “We will keep challenging President Trump’s flagrantly unlawful order.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a co-plaintiff, looked for a silver lining: Red states, which sought universal injunctions to stymie Biden administration policies, would encounter obstacles pursuing that strategy under a future Democratic president, he said.
One of the three suits filed on Friday was filed on behalf of plaintiffs, including five pregnant women whose children would be denied citizenship under Trump’s order.
“Every pregnant mother cannot file a lawsuit to make sure their children have U.S. citizenship,” said one of the women, an asylum seeker identified as Monica, in a statement released by the immigrant advocacy group CASA and other organizations.
Trump’s policy would deny citizenship at birth to an average of 255,000 babies born annually in the U.S. to unauthorized immigrants or temporary visa holders, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.
The justices left questions about the legality of the president’s policy for another day. It is possible that one or more cases on the issue could return to the court in a matter of months.
In recent decades, presidents of both parties have fumed over having their policies blocked nationwide by federal judges, particularly because litigants often file lawsuits in courts they expect to be sympathetic to their claims.
During the administration of former President Joe Biden, judges in conservative districts blocked policies, including COVID-19 vaccine requirements and his student-debt forgiveness plan. Barrett’s opinion observed that “during the first 100 days of the second Trump administration, district courts issued approximately 25 universal injunctions.”
University of Chicago law professor Alison LaCroix said the decision will force more individuals to chart their own paths in court. “We’re going to put the onus on individual potential plaintiffs to go start some sort of proceeding, which, for lots and lots of reasons, we know people aren’t going to be able to do.”
While suggesting that universal injunctions are hardly ever appropriate, Friday’s ruling pointed to an alternative method to protect the rights of large numbers of people: class actions. Those suits, however, require additional procedures at the outset and offer the government opportunities to contest the size and scope of the class, or whether such a suit is appropriate at all.
While Barrett didn’t address the legality of Trump’s decree, the dissenters likened it to Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 case holding “that the children of enslaved black Americans were not citizens,” Sotomayor wrote. The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, nullified Dred Scott and, until Trump’s order, had been understood to extend citizenship to all children born in the U.S., she wrote.
“The Order’s patent unlawfulness reveals the gravity of the majority’s error and underscores why equity supports universal injunctions as appropriate remedies in this kind of case,” Sotomayor wrote.
Barrett said the dissenters’ rhetoric was beside the point. “Nothing like a universal injunction was available at the founding, or for that matter, for more than a century thereafter. Thus, under the Judiciary Act, federal courts lack authority to issue them,” she wrote.
Once upon a time, there was a president who wanted to be king. His Congress was acquiescent. The high court approved. But lower federal courts held firm to the rule of law. Time and again, they blocked the president from seizing power and violating the nation’s laws. So the president turned to the justices on the Supreme Court for a favor: please stop these meddlesome little courts from getting in my way. And then one day in June, the Supreme Court granted his wish.
This is what happened on Friday in a case about birthright citizenship before the United States Supreme Court. The Trump administration’s blatantly unconstitutional executive order from January denying birthright citizenship to the children of certain classes of immigrants quickly ran up against lower court judges, who prohibited the Trump administration from violating one of the country’s most sacred Constitutional rights.
The administration used this case as a vehicle to ask the Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to protect it, and not only in this case, from all universal injunctions, which judges issue to block potentially illegal government actions on a nationwide basis. The six GOP appointees that form a right-wing majority acquiesced, finding that universal injunctions likely exceed the powers of the lower courts. As a result, no matter how brazenly unconstitutional a presidential act may be, the courts generally cannot protect anyone who does not personally sue or is unable to join a class action lawsuit.
“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which was joined by her fellow Democratic appointees, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “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… That holding renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit.” When the Constitution and the president face off, the Constitution falls.
“The Court’s decision is nothing less than an open invitation for the Government to bypass the Constitution,” Sotomayor warned. “The Executive Branch can now enforce policies that flout settled law and violate countless individuals’ constitutional rights, and the federal courts will be hamstrung to stop its actions fully.” This is the new America.
This case, called Trump v. CASA, is the second time in a year that the Supreme Court has ended its term with a ruling that threatens American democracy to its core. On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court granted presidents broad criminal immunity for official acts, pushing the evolution of the presidency further toward monarchy. Dissenting from that decision, the three Democratic appointees warned that America’s very system of government was eroding. One year ago, it was the president in his personal capacity whom the Republican justices placed above the law. Today, those same six justices place the president’s prerogatives above the legal and constitutional rights of everyone else.
Justice Jackson, in her own dissent, digs into the profound threat this decision poses to the rule of law by, in effect, exempting the president from following it. Whether or not this decision has the practical effect of denying birthright citizenship to children born on US soil, Jackson warns, this decision has altered our system of government and, sooner or later, may destroy it. “Disaster looms,” she warns. If a court cannot command the executive to follow the law, then there exists “a zone of lawlessness within which the Executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes, and where individuals who would otherwise be entitled to the law’s protection become subject to the Executive’s whims instead.” This is, of course, not how democracy works. But it is, now, the law of the land in the United States.
Jackson’s dissent is meant to explain the precise ways the majority’s decision undoes our system of government, by pulling back from the power-sharing structure the Framers crafted and replacing it with the monarchical system they had just cast off. The Framers hoped that the ambitions of each branch would cause them to zealously check the excesses of the others. But, under Trump, the other branches channel their ambitions not through their own power, but fealty to his.
“The Court’s decision is nothing less than an open invitation for the Government to bypass the Constitution.”
“In this country, the Executive does not stand above or outside of the law,” Jackson writes. But her dissent is also a warning that this is becoming less true. A year ago, the Republican appointees exempted the president from the dictates of criminal law. Now, it suggests that even if a court finds the administration’s actions likely illegal or unconstitutional, it can continue to enforce them against those who haven’t challenged the action in court, either individually or as part of a class action. As a result, the president rises beyond the bounds of the law, and individuals slip from the embrace of its protection.
But as the old saying implies, if they first come for those without lawyers, then they will come for the rest of us. A partial king will seek to become a complete ruler. “I have no doubt that, if judges must allow the Executive to act unlawfully in some circumstances, as the Court concludes today, executive lawlessness will flourish, and from there, it is not difficult to predict how this all ends,” Jackson wrote. “Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more.”
The nation’s highest court could have said no to this eventuality. But today, it said yes.
The legal battle over President Donald Trump’s move to end birthright citizenship is far from over despite the Republican administration’s major victory Friday limiting nationwide injunctions.
Immigrant advocates are vowing to fight to ensure birthright citizenship remains the law as the Republican president tries to do away with more than a century of precedent.
The high court’s ruling sends cases challenging the president’s birthright citizenship executive order back to the lower courts. But the ultimate fate of the president’s policy remains uncertain.
Here’s what to know about birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court’s ruling, and what happens next.
What does birthright citizenship mean?
Birthright citizenship makes anyone born in the United States an American citizen, including children born to mothers in the country illegally.
The practice goes back to soon after the Civil War, when Congress ratified the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, in part to ensure that Black people, including former slaves, had citizenship.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States,” the amendment states.
Thirty years later, Wong Kim Ark, a man born in the U.S. to Chinese parents, was refused re-entry into the U.S. after traveling overseas. His suit led to the Supreme Court explicitly ruling that the amendment gives citizenship to anyone born in the U.S., no matter their parents’ legal status.
It has been seen since then as an intrinsic part of U.S. law, with only a handful of exceptions, such as for children born in the U.S. to foreign diplomats.
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Trump has long said he wants to do away with birthright citizenship
Trump’s executive order, signed in January, seeks to deny citizenship to children who are born to people who are living in the U.S. illegally or temporarily. It’s part of the hardline immigration agenda of the president, who has called birthright citizenship a “magnet for illegal immigration.”
Trump and his supporters focus on one phrase in the amendment — “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” – saying it means the U.S. can deny citizenship to babies born to women in the country illegally.
A series of federal judges have said that’s not true and issued nationwide injunctions stopping his order from taking effect.
“I’ve been on the bench for over four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented was as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” U.S. District Judge John Coughenour said at a hearing earlier this year in his Seattle courtroom.
In Greenbelt, Maryland, a Washington suburb, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman wrote that “the Supreme Court has resoundingly rejected and no court in the country has ever endorsed” Trump’s interpretation of birthright citizenship.
Is Trump’s order constitutional? The justices didn’t say
The high court’s ruling was a major victory for the Trump administration in that it limited an individual judge’s authority in granting nationwide injunctions. The administration hailed the ruling as a monumental check on the powers of individual district court judges, whom Trump supporters have argued want to usurp the president’s authority with rulings blocking his priorities around immigration and other matters.
But the Supreme Court did not address the merits of Trump’s bid to enforce his birthright citizenship executive order.
“The Trump administration made a strategic decision, which I think quite clearly paid off, that they were going to challenge not the judges’ decisions on the merits, but on the scope of relief,” said Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Law School professor.
Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters at the White House that the administration is “very confident” that the high court will ultimately side with the administration on the merits of the case.
Questions and uncertainty swirl around the next steps
The justices kicked the cases challenging the birthright citizenship policy back down to the lower courts, where judges will have to decide how to tailor their orders to comply with the new ruling. The executive order remains blocked for at least 30 days, giving lower courts and the parties time to sort out the next steps.
The Supreme Court’s ruling leaves open the possibility that groups challenging the policy could still get nationwide relief through class-action lawsuits and seek certification as a nationwide class. Within hours after the ruling, two class-action suits had been filed in Maryland and New Hampshire seeking to block Trump’s order.
But obtaining nationwide relief through a class action is difficult as courts have put up hurdles to doing so over the years, said Suzette Malveaux, a Washington and Lee University law school professor.
“It’s not the case that a class action is a sort of easy, breezy way of getting around this problem of not having nationwide relief,” said Malveaux, who had urged the high court not to eliminate the nationwide injunctions.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who penned the court’s dissenting opinion, urged the lower courts to “act swiftly on such requests for relief and to adjudicate the cases as quickly as they can to enable this Court’s prompt review” in cases “challenging policies as blatantly unlawful and harmful as the Citizenship Order.”
Opponents of Trump’s order warned there would be a patchwork of polices across the states, leading to chaos and confusion without nationwide relief.
“Birthright citizenship has been settled constitutional law for more than a century,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge, a nonprofit that supports refugees and migrants. “By denying lower courts the ability to enforce that right uniformly, the Court has invited chaos, inequality, and fear.”
“For the past four years, Republicans ran to their handpicked judges in select districts seeking universal injunctions against Biden Administration policies they disliked,” U.S. Sen. Peter Welch of Vermont said in a statement.
“Now, mere months into his administration, President Trump’s Supreme Court has decided to limit lower courts’ ability to hold him accountable. Let’s be clear: this is another instance of the Court bending over backwards to insulate this administration from any restraint on its power,” he said.
The move in New Hampshire comes hours after the conservative majority of the Supreme Court ruled that federal judges lack the authority to grant nationwide injunctions, but left unclear whether Trump’s restrictions on birthright citizenship could soon take effect in parts of the country.
“Every court to have looked at this cruel order agrees that it is unconstitutional,” Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement. “The Supreme Court’s decision did not remotely suggest otherwise, and we are fighting to make sure President Trump cannot trample on the citizenship rights of a single child.”
A similar lawsuit was also filed in Maryland.
Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, an advocacy group for the preservation of Social Security benefits, said the court’s ruling could open the door to the agency ending its enumeration at birth program.
Virtually all babies born in the U.S. are automatically given a Social Security number.
“If there are new injunctions or in the unlikely event that injunctions get lifted, SSA has to change its procedures,” she said, referring to the Social Security Administration.
It could mean the SSA puts an end to its enumeration at birth program, she said, or “costing a huge amount of money, causing huge inconvenience and swamping already overwhelmed field offices.”
One of the women who sued over Trump’s executive birthright citizenship order says she remains worried the government could try to take away her child’s citizenship.
The woman, identified only as Liza, said her new baby would have been stateless if the order were in force. She and her husband fled the government in her home country of Russia and were afraid to try to obtain Russian citizenship for the baby.
“The executive order made us feel as if our baby was considered a nobody,” she said.
Since she is a plaintiff in a lawsuit over the order, Friday’s Supreme Court order won’t affect her baby’s citizenship status. She’s one of the mothers suing along with the group CASA, which is trying to get the executive order blocked through a class-action lawsuit.
“The Supreme Court has departed from decades of settled precedents that ensured that sweeping laws purportedly for the benefit of minors do not limit adults’ access to First Amendment-protected materials,” national legal director of the ACLU Cecillia Wang said in a statement Friday.
“The legislature claims to be protecting children from sexually explicit materials, but the law will do little to block their access, and instead deters adults from viewing vast amounts of First Amendment-protected content,” she added.