Supreme Court in birthright case limits judges' power to block presidential policies

Highlights

• Trump seeks to limit birthright citizenship
• Plaintiffs say order violates constitutional provision
• Order could affect 150,000 babies born annually in US
• Conservative justices power the court's 6-3 ruling

The US Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a major victory on Friday in a case involving birthright citizenship by curbing the ability of judges to impede his policies nationwide, changing the power balance between the federal judiciary and presidents.

The 6-3 ruling, authored by conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, did not let Trump's directive restricting birthright citizenship go into effect immediately, directing lower courts that blocked it to reconsider the scope of their orders. The ruling also did not address the legality of the policy, part of Trump's hardline approach toward immigration.

The Republican president lauded the ruling and said his administration can now try to move forward with numerous policies such as his birthright citizenship executive order 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 granted the administration's request to narrow the scope of three so-called "universal" injunctions issued by federal judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington state that halted enforcement of his directive nationwide while litigation challenging the policy plays out. The court's conservative justices were in the majority and its liberal members dissented.

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 applying 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 litigation found that Trump's order likely violates citizenship language in the US Constitution's 14th Amendment.

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.

Warning against an "imperial judiciary," Barrett wrote, "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."

Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the ruling a "travesty for the rule of law" as she read a summary of her dissent from the bench.

In her written dissent, joined by the court's two other liberal justices, Sotomayor criticized the court's majority for ignoring whether Trump's executive order is constitutional.

"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," Sotomayor wrote.

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 ruling was issued on the final day of decisions on cases argued before the Supreme Court during its nine-month term that began in October. The court also issued rulings on Friday backing a Texas law regarding online pornography, letting parents opt children out of classes when storybooks with LGBT characters are read, endorsing the Federal Communications Commission's funding mechanism for expanded phone and broadband internet access and preserving Obamacare's provision on health insurers covering preventive care.

'MONUMENTAL VICTORY'

Trump called the ruling a "monumental victory for the Constitution, the separation of powers and the rule of law."

The policies Trump said his administration can now attempt to proceed with included cutting off funds to so-called "sanctuary cities," suspending resettlement of refugees in the United States, freezing "unnecessary" federal funding and preventing federal funds from paying for gender-affirming surgeries.

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

Friday's ruling did not rule out all forms of broad relief.

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," wrote Barrett, who Trump appointed to the court in 2020.

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.

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."

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."

Maryland-based US District Judge Deborah Boardman, who previously blocked the order nationwide, scheduled a Monday hearing after immigration rights advocates filed a motion asking her to treat the case as a class action and block the policy nationwide again.

"The Supreme Court has now instructed that, in such circumstances, class-wide relief may be appropriate," the lawyers wrote in their motion.

Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown, whose state helped secure the nationwide injunction issued by a judge in Seattle, called Friday's ruling "disappointing on many levels" but stressed that the justices "confirmed that courts may issue broad injunctions when needed to provide complete relief to the parties."

Universal injunctions have been opposed by presidents of both parties - Republican and Democratic - and can prevent the government from enforcing a policy against anyone, instead of just the individual plaintiffs who sued to challenge the policy.

Proponents have said they are an efficient check on presidential overreach, and have stymied actions deemed unlawful by presidents of both parties.

'ILLEGAL AND CRUEL'

The American Civil Liberties Union called the ruling troubling, but limited, because lawyers can seek additional protections for potentially affected families.

"The executive order is blatantly illegal and cruel. It should never be applied to anyone," said Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project. "The court's decision to potentially open the door to enforcement is disappointing, but we will do everything in our power to ensure no child is ever subjected to the executive order."

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 1861-1865 that ended slavery in the United States. 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."

The administration contends that the 14th Amendment, long understood to confer citizenship to virtually anyone born in the United States, does not extend to immigrants who are in the country illegally or even to immigrants whose presence is lawful but temporary, such as university students or those on work visas.

In a June 11-12 Reuters/Ipsos poll, 24% of all respondents supported ending birthright citizenship and 52% opposed it. Among Democrats, 5% supported ending it, with 84% opposed. Among Republicans, 43% supported ending it, with 24% opposed. The rest said they were unsure or did not respond to the question.

The Supreme Court 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 30 and May 19, 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.