Supreme Court curtails nationwide injunctions against Trump on birthright citizenship
By Brett Rowland and Andrew Rice
The Center Square
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Friday to allow President Donald Trump's executive order restricting birthright citizenship to go into effect in some areas of the country by limiting the power of judges to block the president's policies nationwide.
The high court didn't decide the issue of birthright citizenship but limited the lower court rulings to apply only to those who sue to block Trump's order. A group of Democrat-led states sued along with expectant mothers and immigration organizations who filed suit.
The Trump administration can implement the birthright citizenship order, but must wait 30 days before trying to deny anyone citizenship.
The court's conservative majority knocked lower courts for issuing broad injunctions blocking Trump's policy nationwide. The court said that because such orders go beyond providing relief to the plaintiffs, they "likely exceed" the authority Congress granted to district judges.
"Universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts The Court grants the Government's applications for a partial stay of the injunctions entered below," Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the decision for the majority. "But only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue."
The court's three Democratic-appointed justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – dissented.
"No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates," Sotomayor wrote for the minority. "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."
Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench.
Trump called the decision a win.
"GIANT WIN in the United States Supreme Court!" the president wrote in a social media post. "Even the Birthright Citizenship Hoax has been, indirectly, hit hard. It had to do with the babies of slaves (same year!), not the SCAMMING of our Immigration process."
The ruling came out of Trump's Jan. 20 executive order ending birthright citizenship. A flurry of states and organizations sued in response to the president's order, which caused the Trump administration to request emergency relief from the Supreme Court regarding the scope of national injunctions employed in three cases.
The high court agreed to hear arguments in three cases on May 15 when justices debated the scope of nationwide injunctions rather than the merits of the president's order ending birthright citizenship.