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The US supreme court has supported Donald Trump’s attempt to limit lower-court orders that have so far blocked his administration’s ban on birthright citizenship, in a ruling that could strips federal judges of a power they’ve used to obstruct many of Trump’s orders nationwide.
The decision represents a fundamental shift in how US federal courts can constrain presidential power. Previously, any of the country’s more than 1,000 judges in its 94 district courts – the lowest level of federal court, which handles trials and initial rulings – could issue nationwide injunctions that immediately halt government policies across all 50 states.
Under the supreme court ruling, however, those court orders only apply to the specific plaintiffs – for example, groups of states or non-profit organizations – that brought the case.
The court’s opinion on the constitutionality of whether some American-born children can be deprived of citizenship remains undecided and the fate of the US president’s order to overturn birthright citizenship rights was left unclear, despite Trump claiming a “giant win”.
To stymie the impact of the ruling, immigration aid groups have rushed to recalibrate their legal strategy to block Trump’s policy ending birthright citizenship.
Immigrant advocacy groups including Casa and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (Asap) – who filed one of several original lawsuits challenging the president’s executive order – are asking a federal judge in Maryland for an emergency block on Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order. They have also refiled their broader lawsuit challenging the policy as a class-action case, seeking to protections for every pregnant person or child born to families without permanent legal status, no matter where they live.
“We’re confident this will prevent this administration from attempting to selectively enforce their heinous executive order,” said George Escobar, chief of programs and services at CASA. “These are scary times, but we are not powerless, and we have shown in the past, and we continue to show that when we fight, we win.”
The decision on Friday morning decided by six votes to three by the nine-member bench of the highest court in the land, sided with the Trump administration in a historic case that tested presidential power and judicial oversight.
The conservative majority wrote that “universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts”, granting “the government’s applications for a partial stay of the injunctions entered below, but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue”.
The ruling, written by the conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett, did not let Trump’s policy seeking a ban on birthright citizenship go into effect immediately and did not address the policy’s legality. The fate of the policy remains imprecise.
With the court’s conservatives in the majority and its liberals dissenting, the ruling specified that Trump’s executive order cannot take effect until 30 days after Friday’s ruling.
Trump celebrated the ruling as vindication of his broader agenda to roll back judicial constraints on executive power. “Thanks to this decision, we can now promptly file to proceed with numerous policies that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis,” Trump said from the White House press briefing room on Friday. “It wasn’t meant for people trying to scam the system and come into the country on a vacation.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson delivered a scathing dissent. She argued that the majority’s decision, restricting federal court powers to grant national legal relief in cases, allows Trump to enforce unconstitutional policies against people who haven’t filed lawsuits, meaning only those with the resources and legal standing to challenge the order in court would be protected.
“The court’s decision to permit the executive to violate the constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law,” Jackson wrote. “Given the critical role of the judiciary in maintaining the rule of law … it is odd, to say the least, that the court would grant the executive’s wish to be freed from the constraints of law by prohibiting district courts from ordering complete compliance with the constitution.”
Speaking from the bench, the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor called the court’s majority decision “a travesty for the rule of law”.
Birthright citizenship was enshrined in the 14th amendment following the US civil war in 1868, specifically to overturn the supreme court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision that denied citizenship to Black Americans.
The principle has stood since 1898, when the supreme court granted citizenship to Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents who could not naturalize.
The ruling will undoubtedly exacerbate the fear and uncertainty many expecting mothers and immigrant families across the US have felt since the administration first attempted to end the right to birthright citizenship.
Liza, one of several expecting mothers who were named as plaintiffs in the case challenging Trump’s birthright citizenship policy, said she had since given birth to a “happy and healthy” baby, who was born a US citizen thanks to the previous, nationwide injunction blocking Trump’s order. But she and her husband, both Russian nationals who fear persecution in their home country, still feel unsettled.
“We remain worried, even now that one day the government could still try to take away our child’s US citizenship,” she said at a press conference on Friday. “I have worried a lot about whether the government could try to detain or deport our baby. At some point, the executive order made us feel as though our baby was considered a nobody.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) condemned the ruling as opening the door to partial enforcement of a ban on automatic birthright citizenship for almost everyone born in the US, in what it called an illegal policy.
“The executive order is blatantly illegal and cruel. It should never be applied to anyone,” Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement.
Democratic attorneys general who brought the original challenge said in a press conference that while the ruling had been disappointing, the silver lining was that the supreme court left open pathways for continued protection and that “birthright citizenship remains the law of the land”.
“We fought a civil war to address whether babies born on United States soil are, in fact, citizens of this country,” New Jersey’s attorney general, Matthew Platkin, said, speaking alongside colleagues from Washington state, California, Massachusetts and Connecticut. “For a century and a half, this has not been in dispute.”
Trump’s January executive order sought to deny birthright citizenship to babies born on US soil if their parents lack legal immigration status – defying the 14th amendment’s guarantee that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” are citizens – and made justices wary during the hearing.
The real fight in Trump v Casa Inc, wasn’t about immigration but judicial power. Trump’s lawyers demanded that nationwide injunctions blocking presidential orders be scrapped, arguing judges should only protect specific plaintiffs who sue – not the entire country.
Three judges blocked Trump’s order nationwide after he signed it on inauguration day, which would enforce citizenship restrictions in states where courts had not specifically blocked them. The policy targeted children of both undocumented immigrants and legal visa holders, demanding that at least one parent be a lawful permanent resident or US citizen.
Reuters contributed reporting
