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 Republican president welcomed the ruling and said his administration can now seek to proceed with numerous policies such as his executive order aiming to restrict birthright citizenship that he said “have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis.”
“We have so many of them. I have a whole list,” Trump told reporters at the White House.
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.
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 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.
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
Trump called the ruling a “monumental victory for the Constitution, the separation of powers and the rule of law.”
“It was a grave threat to democracy, frankly, and instead of merely ruling on the immediate cases before them, these judges have attempted to dictate the law for the entire nation,” Trump said of nationwide injunctions.
On his first day back in office, 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.
The case before the 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.
In her dissent, Sotomayor said Trump’s executive order is obviously unconstitutional. So rather than defend it on the merits, she wrote, the Justice Department “asks this Court to hold that, no matter how illegal a law or policy, courts can never simply tell the Executive to stop enforcing it against anyone.”
Friday’s ruling did not rule out all forms of broad relief.
A key part of the ruling said judges may provide “complete relief” only to the plaintiffs before them. It did not foreclose the possibility that states might need an injunction that applies beyond their borders to obtain complete relief.
“We decline to take up those arguments in the first instance,” Barrett wrote.
The ruling left untouched the potential for plaintiffs to seek wider relief through class action lawsuits, but that legal mechanism is often harder to successfully mount.
Sotomayor advised parents of children who would be affected by Trump’s order “to file promptly class action suits and to request temporary injunctive relief for the putative class.”
Just two hours after the Supreme Court ruled, lawyers for the plaintiffs in the Maryland case filed a motion seeking to have a judge who previously blocked Trump’s order to grant class action status to all children who would be ineligible for birthright citizenship if the executive order takes effect.
“The Supreme Court has now instructed that, in such circumstances, class-wide relief may be appropriate,” the lawyers wrote in their motion.
REUTERS
