Takeaways from the Supreme Court’s ruling on power of judges and birthright citizenship
The Supreme Court delivered a major win to President Donald Trump on Friday in his ongoing war with the federal judiciary, limiting the power of courts to step in and block policies on a nationwide basis in the short term while judges review their legality. Though the case was intertwined with Trump’s executive order effectively ending birthright citizenship, the ruling does not settle the issue of whether the president can enforce that order. Additionally, there were indications that the policy might be stopped quickly by lower courts. However, the decision of the high court does suggest that Americans wishing to successfully challenge Trump's future policies may be required to complete additional steps. Lower courts will have to sort out how exactly that will work in the coming days. Here’s what to know about the court’s decision: Important win for Trump The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling could have far-reaching consequences for Trump’s second term, even if his birthright citizenship order is never enforced. That’s because it will limit the power of courts to strike down other policies in the future.
Trump has correctly pointed out that nationwide injunctions have been issued against him more frequently than against previous presidents. Presidents of both parties have complained about these injunctions for years. Lower courts, for instance, have used the orders to temporarily block his efforts to deport migrants under the Alien Enemies Act and prohibit transgender service members in the military.
“This was a big decision,” Trump said from the White House shortly after the ruling was issued. The president described the outcome as an “amazing decision, one that we’re very happy about.”
But exactly how future litigation shakes out remains to be seen. Private parties – in the birthright citizenship case, a group of pregnant women who sued – may still be able to get a court to shut down a policy temporarily through a class-action lawsuit.
And states may still be able to secure a hold on an administration’s policies in the short term as well.
SCOTUS time is Trump’s time
For the second time in as many years, the conservative Supreme Court concluded its term with a landmark decision in Trump's favor. Last year, a 6-3 majority ruled that Trump – and other presidents – are at least presumptively immune from criminal prosecution for actions taken in office. Trump was able to avoid a trial on federal election subversion charges because of this decision. And since taking office again in January, Trump has won case after case on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket. A decision earlier in the week allowing Trump to deport certain migrants to countries other than their homeland marked the 10th time the court has granted a request from Trump on the emergency docket, though a few of those cases amounted to a mixed win for the administration.
The court has allowed Trump to fire board members at independent agencies, remove transgender Americans from military service and end other protections for migrants, even those in the country legally.
His biggest victory to date is Friday's ruling from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whom Trump has criticized behind closed doors.
Jackson: ‘Executive lawlessness will flourish’
In sharp dissents, the court's three liberal justices disagreed with their conservative colleagues' landmark decision and raised concerns about how the decision will allow Trump or future presidents to implement illegal policies despite ongoing legal challenges. Writing for the liberal wing, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that the majority had "shamefully" played along with the administration's "gamesmanship" in the case. She said that the administration was trying to enforce a policy that was "patently unconstitutional" by asking the justices not to bless the policy but to limit the power of federal judges across the country. “The court’s decision is 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,” she wrote.
On Friday, the senior liberal justice took the unusual step of reading portions of her dissent from the bench for approximately 20 minutes. In doing so, she added in a line not included in her written dissent to invoke the court’s landmark ruling last year that granted Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution.
“The other shoe has dropped on executive immunity,” Sotomayor declared from the bench.
Separately, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson appeared to raise the stakes of the injunction case even further in a scathing solo dissent on Friday. She said that her conservative colleagues had allowed Trump to "violate the Constitution," posing "an existential threat to the rule of law." “I have no doubt that, if judges must allow the executive to act unlawfully in some circumstances, as the court concludes today, executive lawlessness will flourish, and from there, it is not difficult to predict how this all ends,” she wrote. “Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional republic will be no more.”
Shift to class-action lawsuits
Even though the court significantly restricted the ability of Trump's adversaries to obtain court orders that prevent or impede his implementation of various national policies, the conservative justices left open one important legal option: class-action lawsuits, in which a litigant sues on behalf of a larger group of similarly situated individuals to obtain relief for all individuals who may be affected by a policy. Several groups moved quickly Friday to do just that.
The immigrant rights groups and pregnant women challenging Trump’s order in Maryland pressed the federal judge who previously blocked the policy to do so again through a class action lawsuit.
Such class-action litigation could potentially lead to the same outcome as nationwide injunctions – and during arguments in the case, several justices questioned the significance of shifting the emphasis to class-action suits. One difference is that a judge generally must take the extra step of thinking about who should be covered by an injunction.
During arguments in the case in May, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the difference may be nothing more than “technicality.”
“We care about technicalities,” he said at the time. “And this may all be a technicality.”
The plaintiffs' attorneys asked US District Judge Deborah Boardman to certify a nationwide class that would include any children born after February 19, 2025 and affected by Trump's order. On behalf of each potential class member, they filed an updated lawsuit challenging Trump's order. They also asked Boardman, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, for an emergency order that would temporarily block Trump’s executive order from applying to members of a “putative class” of individuals that would be impacted by the policy.
According to the lawsuit, "the Court can protect all members of the putative class from irreparable harm that the unlawful Executive Order threatens to inflict," in accordance with the Supreme Court's most recent instructions. The American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing challengers in another case over Trump’s order, on Friday filed a new class action lawsuit targeting Trump’s order.
“That’s one of the ways in which people who are harmed around the country by President Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship will be able to go and get protection from the courts for this fundamental American right,” ACLU national legal director Cecillia Wang told CNN.
States will keep fighting
Barrett was careful to say that parties could still seek nationwide relief to pause a policy if that was required to address their harm. That is precisely the argument nearly two dozen Democratic states made challenging the birthright policy and while the court didn’t directly address it, it left wide room for states to make that claim again.
The states had argued they needed a nationwide block on Trump’s birthright citizenship policy because it was too easy for people to cross state borders to have a baby in New Jersey – where that child would be a citizen – rather than staying in Pennsylvania, where it might not.
Now, the states will likely return to a lower court and argue that the birthright policy should remain on hold while courts decide its constitutionality.
“We believe that we will prevail and that we’ve made the case already, and when the lower courts, under the instruction of the US Supreme Court, do that review, we will secure a nationwide injunction to provide relief to the plaintiff states,” California Attorney General of California Rob Bonta, a Democrat, told reporters.
“It’s now up to the lower courts to reconsider if the nationwide injunction is appropriate and necessary to provide complete relief to the states whose AG’s sued to challenge this order,” he said.
That litigation may ultimately return to the Supreme Court. The administration, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi, was "very confident" that the Supreme Court would ultimately rule in its favor regarding the merits of Trump's executive order. “Birthright citizenship will be decided in October, in the next session by the Supreme Court,” Bondi predicted at the White House.
Given the court's usual pace, there is a good chance the issue will eventually be brought before the justices, despite Bondi's optimistic timing prediction.