Supreme Court curbs injunctions but other ‘pathways' remain to defend birthright citizenship, legal experts say

Boston Globe

27-06-2025

The ruling 'does not address the merits of the Trump administration's unprecedented claims regarding who is entitled to birthright citizenship,' he said.
'At the very outset of the opinion, the [majority] court makes clear that its decision is about scope of relief. It does not touch on the merits of the argument. On that score, every federal court that has decided this issue going back 150, years and more, has made clear that any child born in the United States is a United States citizen.'
He added: 'Nothing in today's Supreme Court ruling does anything to disturb that. So that's the one important takeaway from this decision.'
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Lawyers for Civil Rights filed a lawsuit Jan. 21 seeking to block Trump's order on behalf of
two expectant mothers and two nonprofit groups,
A second suit
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Two cities, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., joined the states in the suit.
US District Court Judge Leo Sorokin issued an universal injunction in response to the lawsuits. But that ruling by Sorokin was invalidated by the Supreme Court decision on Friday.
In a statement Friday, Campbell decried the majority ruling in the birthright case.
'I am proud to defend birthright citizenship and the rights of those born in the United States, which are guaranteed by the 14th Amendment,' Campbell, a Democrat, said in a statement.
She said she's 'confident our case will be successful, and the President's blatantly unconstitutional executive order will ultimately be struck down.'
While Friday's ruling is disappointing, Campbell said, 'we look forward to demonstrating why nationwide relief in this case is necessary, as the court has invited us to do. We will once again demonstrate what this country has known to be true since the Civil War: citizenship should not, cannot, and must not depend on the state where a baby was born.'
Sellstrom said the majority's decision has potentially beneficial impacts for LCR's clients and others likely to be impacted by the Trump administration's argument that birthright citizenship is not a constitutional right enjoyed by anyone born in the US.
In one footnote, he said, the majority explicitly wrote that the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) which allows judges to strike down executive actions, is not impacted by the decision on universal injunctions.
Sellstrom said LCR's challenge to the administration's executive order included a claim under the APA and that remains an active part of the lawsuit pending before US District Court Judge Leo Sorokin. (The majority did knock down Sorokin's universal injunction.)
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He also stressed that class action lawsuits remain a viable alternative to universal injunctions. A class action benefits all, even those noted named plaintiffs, he said.
'It certainly makes it more difficult to have the birthright citizenship principle that the Trump administration wants to put forth taken down universally and quickly,' Sellstrom said. 'But what it does on the procedural level is it leaves open multiple pathways to achieve the same result of a universal injunction, but via different means.'
He said LCR is reaching out to its clients and is reviewing, in detail, the Supreme Court ruling before deciding their next steps. But, he was certain LCR will continue to challenge the administration's targeting of birthright citizenship.
'Today's Supreme Court decision certainly makes that more difficult, but again, there are multiple pathways to achieve that same vindication,' he said. 'It will just take a different pathway than the one that we have drawn so far.'
In February, Sorokin released a 31-page ruling issuing the nationwide preliminary injunction that had been sought by attorneys general from Massachusetts and 17 other states and immigration advocates.
In the ruling, Sorokin wrote that his decision 'is based on straightforward application of settled Supreme Court precedent reiterated and reaffirmed in various ways for more than a century by all three branches of the federal government.'
He noted that the 'loss of birthright citizenship — even if temporary, and later restored at the conclusion of litigation — has cascading effects that would cut across a young child's life (and the life of that child's family), very likely leaving permanent scars.'
The court's failure to resolve whether birthright citizenship remains a valid constitutional right will cause 'chaos' for millions of people, especially for parents whose children are born after the administration issued its executive order, Daniel Kanstroom, a Boston College Law School immigration law expert.
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He said that by focusing its attention to the issue of universal injunctions alone, the Supreme Court's majority has created massive uncertainty for families, for lawyers, for federal judges, for immigration law judges that will take years to untangle.
'I think that that was possibly the worst imaginable case the court could have chosen to deal with the problem of universal injunctions,' he said in a telephone interview Friday. 'It's going to be a huge mess. It's going to cause tremendous fear and uncertainty, probably for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.'
He said the administration's executive order applies to any child born after this February. But that deadline and the order itself does not provide any specifics on who will be impacted – is it just the child born of a mother unlawfully present but where the father is unknown and possibly a citizen, for example, he said.
'You have all kinds of situations, but all these people are now in a precarious moment in terms of the citizenship of their children. And that's particularly problematic because if you have children who are living here and saw they were citizens, and now are not sure,' he said. 'All these people are now in a precarious moment in terms of the citizenship of their children.'
He said the issue decided by the court - universal injunctions - is a valid legal issue. But by intertwining it with the 14th Amendment, the majority missed a major opportunity to protect constitutional rights.
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'It's hard to understand how the Supreme Court is really doing its job,' he said. 'What's going to be created now is just chaos and fear and a staggering amount of work for the district courts.'
This is a developing story and will be updated. Information from earlier Globe reporting was used in this account.
John R. Ellement can be reached at