Donald Trump chalks up 'giant win' as Supreme Court limits judges' power to block his orders

Australia Broadcast Center

27-06-2025

Donald Trump is celebrating what he calls a "giant win" after the US Supreme Court limited the power of federal judges to block the president's executive orders.
The court issued a 6-3 ruling on Friday, local time, in a case built on the president's executive order on removing birthright citizenship, which would strip the children of undocumented and illegal migrants born in America of the right to automatic US citizenship.
Speaking at a White House press conference called after the ruling, Mr Trump said it had been a victory over "radical left judges" whose behaviour he considered "a great threat to democracy".
However, the ruling authored by conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett did not let Mr Trump's policy on birthright citizenship go into effect immediately and did not address the policy's 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 conservative justices in the majority and its liberals dissenting, the ruling specified that Mr Trump's executive order cannot take effect until 30 days after Friday's ruling.
"No one disputes that the Executive has a duty to follow the law," Justice Barrett wrote. "But the Judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation — in fact, sometimes the law prohibits the Judiciary from doing so."
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 this kind of case."
On his first day back in office, Mr Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to refuse to recognise 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 Mr 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, Justice Sotomayor said Mr 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".
"The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the Government makes no attempt to hide it," Justice Sotomayor wrote. "Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along."
Federal judges have taken steps including issuing nationwide orders impeding Mr Trump's aggressive use of executive action to advance his agenda.
The plaintiffs argued that Mr 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 naturalised 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 US, 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.
The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has handed Mr 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 Mr 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.
The court heard arguments in the birthright citizenship dispute on May 15. US Solicitor General D John Sauer, representing the administration, told the justices that Mr Trump's order "reflects the original meaning of the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed citizenship to the children of former slaves, not to illegal aliens or temporary visitors".
An 1898 US Supreme Court ruling in a case called United States v Wong Kim Ark has long been interpreted as guaranteeing that children born in the US to non-citizen parents are entitled to American citizenship.
Mr Trump's administration has argued that the court's ruling in that case was narrower, applying to children whose parents had a "permanent domicile and residence in the United States".
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.
Reuters/ABC