A group of immigrant rights groups and parents are continuing their legal fight over birthright citizenship, days after the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration to limit judges’ ability to block presidential policy via nationwide injunctions.
Nationwide or universal injunctions stop the government from enacting or enforcing a law or policy anywhere in the country.
The Supreme Court decision did not address whether the Trump administration could end birthright citizenship, which guarantees citizenship to nearly anyone born in the United States, as the president attempted to do with an executive order issued on Inauguration Day in January. Instead, the 6–3 decision curtailed the judiciary’s ability to issue universal injunctions.
The majority sent the case back to the lower courts to decide how to act within the constraints of the new ruling, with instructions to “determine whether a narrower injunction is appropriate.”
It represents a massive win for the Trump administration, allowing officials to carry out policies without being hampered by nationwide pauses issued from any federal district court in the country. The administration will still face challenges in court, but it can carry out the president’s agenda in the meantime.
Presidents from both sides of the aisle have been hampered by injunctions in the past. A federal judge in Texas paused the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone during the Biden administration, and the second Trump administration has racked up many pauses, such as for firing federal workers and over deportations.
The Supreme Court decision raised as many questions as it provided answers, including for pregnant mothers with temporary or no legal status in the country. Legal analysts expect that questions around the constitutionality of birthright citizenship will appear before the Supreme Court again. In the meantime, the Supreme Court issued a 30-day pause on President Donald Trump’s executive order from going into effect.
The same day the decision came down, CASA Inc. a nonprofit membership organization that advocates for immigrant and working class communities, and a group of other plaintiffs filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of babies who would be impacted by Trump’s executive order and their parents. Babies born on or after February 19 are “ineligible for birthright citizenship” according to the executive order.
“We are here to say that we are committed to fight to ensure that all US-born children have US citizenship at birth, regardless of their parents’ immigration status,” Conchita Cruz, with one of the groups, the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), said at a press conference on Friday. ASAP was also a plaintiff in the case.
Also on the call was a Russian woman in the US on a student visa. When she and her husband found out about the executive order, they joined the lawsuit out of concern for their baby..
The woman, who only identified herself by her first name, Liza, said that because she and her husband had fled their country, they did not feel safe going to the embassy to get their baby Russian citizenship, and that without the injunction, their baby, who was born after February 19, would have been born stateless and without citizenship.
“I’m sad about what today’s decision means for all of the parents whose children are not protected by the preliminary injunction and who are now even more scared about their children’s future. Each of those parents should have to file to protect their children’s rights. That’s why we filed a class action today, and why I will be a class representative,” she said.
In the dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said for lawsuits “challenging policies as blatantly unlawful and harmful as the Citizenship Order…lower courts would be wise to act swiftly.”
Legal analysts were divided. Some viewed the decision as the Supreme Court ceding ground on checking an overreaching president, while others viewed reigning in the judiciary’s reliance on nationwide injunctions as long overdue.
“That universal injunction remedy is extremely important in cases where you have nationwide illegality by the government, as in the birthright citizenship case,” Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, said in an interview with CT ahead of the decision. And, he added, injunctions are also important in a separate case he is litigating on behalf of businesses concerned about Trump’s tariffs, “where many of the victims, for various reasons, are too poor or otherwise poorly situated to file their own cases, yet it may be hard to do a class action.”
“Class action lawsuits can help, but they’re not a complete replacement for nationwide injunctions, because there are class action certification requirements which will sometimes be hard to meet,” Somin said.
Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, acknowledged that taking nationwide injunctions off the table means more possibility of legal “unevenness,” where one part of the country is subject to a law that has been found unlawful in another part. But he said there are still legal remedies available to curtail a president who is abusing his authority.
“The Supreme Court can move quickly. And when it realizes that there are heavy concerns of national importance, where there is unevenness, it might be inclined to move more quickly as a result of it,” he said.
Since parties should be the ones to bring cases, courts shouldn’t give orders that affect people who aren’t party to the case, Muller argued.
Universal injunctions are “useful tools against executive orders and claims of executive overreach,” he said, “but there have always been claims of executive overreach and mechanisms to deal with them. It will definitely slow down some of the process, but it won’t fundamentally undermine our ability to get courts to resolve these issues.”
He noted that universal injunctions were “essentially nonexistent 15 years ago” and that their usage has skyrocketed, along with presidents relying more on executive orders rather than working with Congress to get things done.
As American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Adam White noted in The Dispatch, Trump has courted controversy by issuing a “tidal wave” of executive orders around dismantling federal agencies, defunding programs, and deporting immigrants. Many of his executive orders have faced injunctions.
The Harvard Law Review found that former president George W. Bush received 6 injunctions, former president Barack Obama received 12, and Trump received 64 during his first term. Former president Joe Biden received 14. So far, the second Trump administration has racked up at least 40.
“Trump has given a flurry of executive orders at much, much higher rates than other presidents,” Muller said. “So there’s no surprise that there’s going to be a much, much higher rate of challenges to these executive orders and a much, much higher rate of court orders related to those issues.”
The court did leave open the prospect of more litigation in the lower courts about exactly how much the injunction power should be curtailed. The justices also noted that plaintiffs negatively impacted by the ruling could seek remedy in other ways, such as through class action lawsuits.
“Federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority in Trump v. CASA. “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 courts to exceed its power, too.”
On day one of his second term, Trump issued an executive order that would end the practice of granting citizenship to children born of parents who were in the US unlawfully or on a temporary basis. He said the 14th Amendment was rightly applied to the children of former slaves but should not apply to the children of undocumented immigrants.
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, approved in 1868, says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
It came in response to the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which held that a Black man who was descended from enslaved people was not a US citizen and thus had no standing to sue. The 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution a year later. In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that a man born to Chinese parents was a US citizen.
Trump’s order soon sparked legal challenges, and lower court judges of a few different jurisdictions sided with a group of states, immigrant rights groups, and pregnant moms to block the administration from enforcing the order. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to curtail the scope of the judges’ orders, arguing that these actions were stopping the executive branch from being able to accomplish its agenda.
The majority was persuaded.
After the decision came down, Trump said he was “grateful to the Supreme Court for stepping in and solving this very, very big and complex problem, and they’ve made it simple.”
“Thanks to this decision, we can now probably file to proceed with these numerous policies and those that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis.”
With universal injunctions weakened, the administration signaled plans to go after birthright citizenship as well as other executive actions that have run into judicial roadblocks, including ending funding for sanctuary cities and suspending refugee resettlement.
Correction: An earlier version of this story had “nationwide legality” in a quote that should have read “nationwide illegality.”
