In a massive win for President Trump, the Supreme Court on Friday granted the Trump administration’s request to partially pause rulings by three federal judges that had blocked the president’s executive order ending birthright citizenship.
Since taking office, President Trump’s entire agenda has been stymied by a handful of liberal activist judges effectively dictating policy for the entire nation by issuing universal injunctions.
In a 6-3 vote, the court decided that they had likely exceeded their authority by issuing nationwide injunctions in the Birthright Citizenship cases.
Universal injunctions “likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts,” wrote Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the author of the majority decision.
The decision will affect hundreds of federal lawsuits challenging Trump administration policies.
Joining his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, in the White House briefing room, the jubilant president told reporters that his administration can now “properly file to proceed with these numerous policies and those that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis, including Birthright citizenship, ending sanctuary city funding, suspending refugee resettlement, freezing unnecessary funding, stopping federal taxpayers from paying for transgender surgeries, and numerous other priorities.”
The Supreme Court on Friday granted the Trump administration’s request to partially pause rulings by three federal judges that had blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship – that is, the guarantee of citizenship to virtually anyone born in the United States
Attorney General Pam Bondi cheered the victory in a post on X: “Today, the Supreme Court instructed district courts to STOP the endless barrage of nationwide injunctions against President Trump. This would not have been possible without tireless work from our excellent lawyers @TheJusticeDept and our Solicitor General John Sauer. This Department of Justice will continue to zealously defend @POTUS’s policies and his authority to implement them.”
On the campaign trail, president promised to rein in birthright citizenship if elected, arguing that it was “meant for the babies of slaves” and has since been abused.
In a 2023 campaign video, he said: “On Day One of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the future children of illegal immigrants will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship.”
While the Supreme Court did not let Trump’s executive order go into effect immediately and also did not address its legality, the majority conservative justices asserted that lower courts did not have the authority to block it.
The justices said that only the Supreme Court has the power to decide on restrictions to federal government policies, and that the use of universal injunctions by lower courts had been abused in recent months.
“When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too,” Barrett wrote.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the proper process for such cases was for a party, if they lose in a lower court, to take it to an appeal’s court and then, eventually, to the Supreme Court.
“After today’s decision, that order of operations will not change,” Kavanaugh wrote in his concurring opinion. “In justiciable cases, this Court, not the district courts or courts of appeals, will often still be the ultimate decisionmaker as to the interim legal status of major new federal statutes and executive actions — that is, the interim legal status for the several-year period before a final decision on the merits.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in her scathing dissent that the decision was “nothing less than an open invitation for the Government to bypass the Constitution.”
“The Executive Branch can now enforce policies that flout settled law and violate countless individuals’ constitutional rights, and the federal courts will be hamstrung to stop its actions fully. Until the day that every affected person manages to become party to a lawsuit and secures for himself injunctive relief, the Government may act lawlessly indefinitely. Not even a decision from this Court would necessarily,” she said.
In a separate dissent, Jackson wrote that the decision from the majority “will disproportionately impact the poor, the uneducated, and the unpopular – i.e., those who may not have the wherewithal to lawyer up, and will all too often find themselves beholden to the Executive’s whims.”
In the majority opinion, Barrett wrote: “Justice Jackson would do well to heed her own admonition: ‘Everyone, from the President on down, is bound by law.’ That goes for judges too.”
“She might be arguing that universal injunctions are appropriate — even required — whenever the defendant is part of the Executive Branch,” Barrett wrote. “If so, her position goes far beyond the mainstream defense of universal injunctions.”
Barrett went on to describe the dissent as “more extreme still,” and said that Jackson’s opinion “is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.”
“We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary,” she wrote.
The president praised Barrett, saying “she wrote the opinion brilliantly” and also commended the rest of the conservative justices for their decision.
“This morning the Supreme Court has delivered a monumental victory for the Constitution, the separation of powers and the rule of law in strike down the excessive use of nationwide injunctions to interfere with the normal functioning of the executive branch,” Trump said.
“I was elected on an historic mandate but in recent months we’ve seen a handful of radical left judges effectively try to overrule the rightful powers of the president to stop the American people from getting the policies that they voted for in record numbers,” the president continued. “It was a grave threat to Democracy, frankly, and instead of ruling on the cases before them, these judges tried to dictate the law for the entire nation.”
According to Newsweek, “the number of babies born to foreign-born moms has hovered around the 800,000 mark for the past decade.”
As federal government data does not give a greater level of detail, this is largely the number analysts and government agencies have to work with.
“If you’re parsing through U.S. census data and trying to get a sense of the number of kids who qualified for birthright citizenship, you are looking at not just the number of U.S. citizen children with at least one undocumented parent, but also children of temporary visa holders, legal permanent residents, and other mixed-status families,” Nan Wu, Director of Research at the American Immigration Council, told Newsweek in March.
The latest U.S. Census Bureau data showed 281,385,809 American-born U.S. citizens at last estimates, out of 334,914,896 total population. Around 22.8 million were not U.S. citizens.
As the justices did not rule on the Birthright Citizenship executive order itself, the ultimate fate of the policy remains uncertain.
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