SCOTUS rules on Trump's birthright citizenship order, testing lower court powers

Fox News

a day ago

The Supreme Court granted a partial stay Friday of President Donald Trump's request to block lower courts from issuing universal injunctions, granting a par victory for the administration as it looks to execute many of its top priorities via executive order and action.
Justices ruled 6-3 to allow the lower courts to issue injunctions in certain cases.
"The applications do not raise—and thus we do not address—the question whether the Executive Order violates the Citizenship Clause or Nationality Act," Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, writing for the majority. "The issue before us is one of remedy: whether, under the Judiciary Act of 1789, federal courts have equitable authority to issue universal injunctions."
"A universal injunction can be justified only as an exercise of equitable authority, yet Congress has granted federal courts no such power," she added.
The Supreme Court agreed in April to hear the consolidated cases, which focused on three lower court judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington state who issued "universal" injunctions against Trump's birthright citizenship executive order.
But that wasn't the main focus of the appeal, or the May 15 oral arguments before the high court.
Rather, the justices considered whether lower courts should have the authority to issue nationwide injunctions at all, or whether doing so exceeds their authority, as argued by U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer.
The ruling is expected to have sweeping implications for U.S. district courts, and comes at a time when presidents, including both Democrat and Republican administrations, have sought to use executive orders as a means of sidestepping a clunky, slow-moving Congress.
Federal judges across the country have blocked Trump's ban on transgender persons serving in the U.S. military, ordered the reinstatement of core functions of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID and halted Elon Musk's government efficiency organization, DOGE, from oversight and access to government agencies, among other things.
Justices across the ideological spectrum appeared to agree during oral arguments this month that the use of universal injunctions has surged in recent years — but after more than two hours, remained split on how to proceed.
No easy solution emerged to the thorny legal problem, as the justices wrestled with a tangle of procedural questions over whether to scale back the use of universal injunctions and what legal standard should govern them.
Sauer argued that lower court judges have used universal injunctions to act beyond their authority and block the lawful powers of a sitting president.
But Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that blocking or limiting lower court injunctions could invite hundreds or thousands of new individual lawsuits.
"Your theory here is arguing that Article III and principles of equity [clause] both prohibit federal courts from issuing universal injunctions to have your argument," she said later, adding: "If that's true, that means even the Supreme Court doesn't have that power."
Justice Elena Kagan, meanwhile, pointed out the practical challenge of expecting the Supreme Court to weigh in on every issue now handled by lower courts, which have already faced hundreds of federal lawsuits during Trump's second term.
She also noted to Sauer that the Trump administration has lost every federal lawsuit challenging the birthright citizenship executive order, including under judges Trump appointed during his first term.
As expected, several conservative justices on the court, including Justice Clarence Thomas, expressed criticism of universal injunctions.
New Jersey Solicitor General Jeremy Feigenbaum, representing the states, acknowledged that there could be alternative remedies for federal courts other than nationwide injunctions — though he suggested that in certain cases, the class action alternative presented by the Trump administration may not move fast enough to grant relief in certain cases.
"We are sympathetic to some of the concerns the United States has about percolation, about running the table in particular cases," he said. "We just don't think that that supports a bright line rule that says they're never available."
Roberts and Sotomayor questioned Feigenbaum more in depth on how to determine in what cases universal injunction should not be the preferred remedy and how to ensure district courts are following that.
Lawyers for the Trump administration asked the high court to review the case earlier this year, arguing that the three lower courts, each of which blocked Trump's birthright citizenship order from taking force nationwide, acted beyond the scope of their authority.
U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer stressed this point during oral arguments earlier this month, telling justices that universal injunctions "require judges to make rushed, high-stakes, low-information decisions."
"They operate asymmetrically, forcing the government to win everywhere," he said, and "invert," in the Trump administration's view, the ordinary hierarchical hierarchy of appellate review.
The Supreme Court decision will have sweeping implications, both in the near- and longer-term, with knock-down effects on the the more than 300 federal lawsuits that have challenged White House actions since Trump's second presidency began on Jan. 20, 2025.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.