U.S. Supreme Court limits nationwide injunctions, in case on Trump birthright citizenship order

The U.S. Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a major victory on Friday by curbing the power of federal judges to impose nationwide rulings impeding his policies, but it left unresolved the issue of whether he can limit birthright citizenship.

The court's 6-3 ruling, authored by conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, did not let Trump's birthright citizenship order go into effect immediately, directing lower courts that blocked it to reconsider the scope of their orders. The ruling also did not address its legality. 

The justices granted a request by the Trump administration to narrow the scope of three nationwide injunctions issued by federal judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington state that halted enforcement of his directive while litigation challenging the policy plays out.

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. The ruling thus raises the prospect of Trump's order eventually taking effect in some parts of the country.

On the first day of his second term in office in January, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to refuse to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States who do not have at least one parent who is an American citizen or lawful permanent resident, also called a "green card" holder.

More than 150,000 newborns would be denied citizenship annually under Trump's directive, according to the plaintiffs who challenged it, including the Democratic attorneys general of 22 states, as well as immigrant rights advocates and pregnant immigrants.

Trump hailed the ruling as a "monumental win" while meeting with reporters at the White House, and said the administration can now move forward on priorities that don't just include ending birthright citizenship, but also on immigration enforcement and laws involving gender-affirming surgeries.

"We have so many of them. I have a whole list," Trump said.

Complaints about 'judge shopping'

Federal judges have taken steps, including issuing numerous nationwide orders, impeding Trump's aggressive use of executive action to advance his agenda. The three judges in the birthright citizenship cases found that Trump's order likely violates citizenship language in the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment.

"No one disputes that the executive has a duty to follow the law. But the judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation — in fact, sometimes the law prohibits the judiciary from doing so," Barrett wrote for the majority.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent joined by the court's other two liberal members, wrote: "The majority ignores entirely whether the president's executive order is constitutional, instead focusing only on the question whether federal courts have the equitable authority to issue universal injunctions. Yet 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.

"Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens to prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship," Sotomayor wrote.

The case before the U.S. Supreme Court was unusual in that the administration used it to argue that federal judges lack the authority to issue nationwide, or "universal," injunctions, and asked the justices to rule that way and enforce the president's directive, even without weighing its legal merits.

The issue is intertwined with concerns of "judge shopping," where interest groups and plaintiffs of all kinds file lawsuits before judges they perceive as political allies or friendly to their causes. The Judicial Conference of the United States, the policymaking body for the federal courts, has been in the process of issuing guidance to curtail the practice.

Attorney General Pam Bondi hailed the decision as a win to stop "the endless barrage of nationwide injunctions against President Trump."

Republicans, and conservatives in particular, have long complained about a single judge enjoining matters for the entire country, though Democrats were aggrieved during Joe Biden's administration when a single judge in Texas issued a sweeping ruling on the abortion medication mifepristone. Ultimately, the Supreme Court essentially rejected that judge's interpretation in a 9-0 ruling. 

No ruling on birthright citizenship

The court heard arguments in the birthright citizenship dispute on May 15.

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, representing the administration, told the justices that Trump's order "reflects the original meaning of the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed citizenship to the children of former slaves, not to illegal aliens or temporary visitors."

The plaintiffs argued that Trump's directive ran afoul of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War of 1861-65 that ended slavery in the U.S. The 14th Amendment's citizenship clause states that 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."

Not all countries automatically confer citizenship at birth. Britain and Australia modified their laws in the 1980s, requiring a parent to be a citizen or permanent resident in order for a newborn to qualify for citizenship, in part to prevent so-called birth tourism.

In Canada, citizenship is overwhelmingly granted to any child born on its soil, regardless of the immigration status of their parents, following the principle of jus soli, Latin for "right of the soil." There are a few exceptions, notably for the children of foreign diplomats.

The current Liberal government in Ottawa is looking through legislation to expand citizenship to children born outside of Canada to Canadian parents.

String of rulings allow White House to enact agenda

The U.S. Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, has handed Trump some important victories on his immigration policies since he returned to office in January.

On Monday, it cleared the way for his administration to resume deporting migrants to countries other than their own without offering them a chance to show the harms they could face. In separate decisions on May 19 and May 30, it let the administration end the temporary legal status previously given by the government to hundreds of thousands of migrants on humanitarian grounds.

But the court on May 16 kept in place its block on Trump's deportations of Venezuelan migrants under a 1798 law historically used only in wartime, faulting his administration for seeking to remove them without adequate due process.