Live Updates: Supreme Court Limits Nationwide Injunctions in Birthright Citizenship Case
“In a major victory for President Trump, the court limited the ability of federal judges to pause his executive orders. The decision may reshape the way U.S. citizenship is granted, even temporarily.
The Supreme Court on Friday limited the ability of federal judges to temporarily pause President Trump’s executive orders, a major victory for the administration. But they made no ruling on the constitutionality of his move to end birthright citizenship, and stopped his order from taking effect for 30 days.
The court’s ruling also appeared to upend the ability of single federal judges to freeze policies across the country, a powerful tool that has been used frequently in recent years to block policies instituted by Democratic and Republican administrations.
In a concurring opinion in the birthright citizenship case, Justice Kavanaugh said another way to challenge the excutive order exists. Challengers can “ask a court to award preliminary classwide relief that may, for example, be statewide, regionwide or even nationwide.”
In a separate dissent for herself alone, Justice Jackson says she agrees with Justice Sotomayor but wants to emphasize that the majority’s decision permits the executive branch to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued, and thus is ”an existential threat to the rule of law.” She says the technical arguments about what judicial authority in the 18th Century are a “smokescreen” to give the president “the go-ahead to sometimes wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate.”
In her dissent, joined by the other two liberal justices, Sotomayor accuses the majority of allowing the government to play games with constitutional rights. She writes:
Liberal justices’ dissent
No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates. Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from lawabiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship. The majority holds that, absent cumbersome class-action litigation, courts cannot completely enjoin even such plainly unlawful policies unless doing so is necessary to afford the formal parties complete relief. That holding renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit. Because I will not be complicit in so grave an attack on our system of law, I dissent.
From the bench, Justice Sotomayor calls the decision “a travesty for the rule of law.”
The essence of the court’s holding today is that Congress, in creating the lower federal courts in the Judiciary Act of 1789, did not give district court judges the power to to issue nationwide or universal injunctions that prohibit the enforcement of a (likely illegal) government policy against anyone. Rather district court judges may only grant relief to specific plaintiffs. But in a concurring opinion, Justice Kavanaugh notes that broader orders will still be permissible when there is a class action lawsuit, or if a plaintiff is asking a judge to set aside a new agency rule under the Administrative Procedures Act.
The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to allow President Trump to end birthright citizenship in some parts of the country, even as legal challenges to the constitutionality of the move proceed in other regions.
The 6-to-3 decision, which was written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett and split along ideological lines, is a major victory for Mr. Trump, and may allow how citizenship is granted in the United States to be reshaped, even temporarily.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor is summarizing her dissent from the bench, a rare move indicating profound disagreement.
In her written dissent, she wrote: “The rule of law is not a given in this Nation, nor any other. It is a precept of our democracy that will endure only if those brave enough in every branch fight for its survival. Today, the Court abdicates its vital role in that effort.”
Justice Barrett, writing for the majority, says the executive order on birthright citizenship “shall not take effect until 30 days after the date of this opinion.”
The delay in the effective date of the court’s ruling gives time for another way to challenge the orders: class actions.
The majority opinion in the case was written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett. She concludes:
Main opinion
Some say that the universal injunction “give[s] the Judiciary a powerful tool to check the Executive Branch.” … 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.
In the citizenship case, the justices voted 6-3, with the liberals in dissent, to limit the lower-courts’ preliminary injunctions to each plaintiff with standing to sue. The majority stressed that it is not addressing the merits of Trump’s attempt to end automatic citizenship for babies born on U.S. soil to undocumented migrants and foreign visitors without green cards.
In mid-May, the Supreme Court took the bench for a rare emergency oral argument, which had been tacked on to the end of the term.
The case focused on whether a single federal judge had the power to freeze a federal policy for the entire country, a long-simmering debate.
The Supreme Court has handed down its opinion in the birthright citizenship case, which is really a case about nationwide (or “universal”) injunctions.
In August 1895, a young cook named Wong Kim Ark was about to disembark from the S.S. Coptic after a long journey home to San Francisco from China, when U.S. customs officials denied him re-entry.
He was not a U.S. citizen, they said. Never mind that Mr. Wong had been born in San Francisco’s Chinatown, not far from the port where he was now being held. The 14th Amendment’s provision for automatic citizenship for all people born on U.S. soil did not apply to him, officials later argued, because he and his parents were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States at the time he was born.“
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