Supreme Court ends nationwide injunctions in ruling on birthright citizenship cases

By Alvin Wu
Domestic Affairs
Supreme Court ends nationwide injunctions in ruling on birthright citizenship cases

President Donald Trump speaks to reporters at a White House press briefing following the Supreme Court ruling striking down nationwide injunctions. THE WHITE HOUSE/Handout

WASHINGTON, July 18 (ZFJ) — Nationwide injunctions exceed the authority of lower court judges, ruled the Supreme Court in three cases concerning birthright citizenship on June 27, 2025.

The Court struck down nationwide injunctions by a 6-3 vote in the cases Trump v. CASA, Inc. (24A884), Trump v. Washington (24A885), and Trump v. New Jersey (24A886).

The Court, which heard the cases consolidated on the emergency docket, only considered the question of nationwide injunctions and issued no ruling on the birthright citizenship order central to the lawsuits.

BACKGROUND

On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to deny birthright citizenship to the children of parents who either entered the country illegally or legally under temporary status.

Advocacy organizations and Democratic states immediately filed suit against Trump’s order, contending that it violates the 14th Amendment. The amendment is part of three amendments passed during the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War, and the inclusion of the birthright citizenship clause was meant to guarantee that former slaves were granted citizenship and the full protection of American laws.

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.

— 14th Amendment, Section 1

An injunction is an equitable remedy. In other words, it is a court order directing someone to do or stop doing something as opposed to granting monetary damages. Pending further arguments and a final court judgment, a court can issue an injunction to grant preliminary injunctive relief to prevent “irreparable injury.”

Each federal district court hearing these cases found the executive order to be likely unconstitutional and entered preliminary injunctions applying nationwide that prohibited the federal government from enforcing Trump’s order against anyone in America. Each appeals court rejected the government’s appeals and upheld the injunctions.

The judiciary’s use of nationwide injunctions has increased substantially in recent years. Former President Joe Biden and Trump lamented that many of their orders were blocked with orders that have also been called universal injunctions. Within the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, judges issued about 25 nationwide injunctions blocking his orders, prompting Trump to decry many of them as “activist judges” and call for their removal.

AGAINST NATIONWIDE INJUNCTIONS

Justice Amy Coney Barrett delivered the opinion of the Court, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh.

Barrett writes that the Court has “held that the statutory grant encompasses only those sorts of equitable remedies ‘traditionally accorded by courts of equity’ at our country’s inception,” so to form the crux of her argument, she reframes the primary question to be “whether universal injunctions are sufficiently ‘analogous’ to the relief issued by the ‘High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the adoption of the Constitution.’”

In other words, Barrett reasons that, for nationwide injunctions to be a power granted to courts under the Judiciary Act of 1789 and thus usable now, they need to have been a practice of the English Court of Chancery back at the time America was founded. She answers this question plainly.

The answer is no: Neither the universal injunction nor any analogous form of relief was available in the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the founding.

— Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Opinion of the Court

She goes on to also discuss precedent in early American courts and later Supreme Court rulings that show them rejecting “relief that extended beyond the parties.” She points out that, for most of American legal history, courts did not use nationwide injunctions, asserting that “had federal courts believed themselves to possess the tool, surely they would not have let it lay idle.”

“A modern device need not have an exact historical match, but under Grupo Mexicano, it must have a founding-era antecedent,” Barrett writes, referencing Grupo Mexicano de Desarrollo v. Alliance Bond Fund, Inc. (98-231).

Barrett rejects the dissent’s argument that the bill of peace is a valid “founding-era forebear,” saying that practice “evolved into the modern class action,” not the nationwide injunction. She also rejects the taxpayer suit as a historical analogue.

Barrett dismisses the argument that the nationwide injunction is necessary for “complete relief,” writing that it “is not synonymous with ‘universal relief.’ It is a narrower concept.”

“Here, prohibiting enforcement of the Executive Order against the child of an individual pregnant plaintiff will give that plaintiff complete relief: Her child will not be denied citizenship,” Barrett reasons. “Extending the injunction to cover all other similarly situated individuals would not render her relief any more complete.”

She notes that attorneys from both sides argued about “administrative burdens” that could result from the lack of a nationwide order. The Court’s response? That’s for the lower courts to deal with.

“Federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them,” Barrett concludes. “When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”

The Court has remanded the case to the lower courts for consideration of a narrower injunction. Trump’s birthright citizenship order can take effect in applicable jurisdictions at earliest 30 days after the Court’s ruling.

Thomas filed a concurring opinion, joined by Gorsuch, to warn courts to tailor injunctive relief to each case, writing that some courts erroneously believe that they “should provide plaintiffs whatever remedy is necessary to give them complete relief.”

“‘To say that a court can award complete relief is not to say that it should do so,’” Thomas says.

“An indivisible remedy is appropriate only when it would be ‘all but impossible’ to devise relief that reaches only the plaintiffs.”

Alito filed a concurring opinion, joined by Thomas, to warn courts to not use class certification to circumvent the Court’s ruling striking down nationwide injunctions.

In order to sue for other parties, a party must show that it has standing for itself and also for others. On this matter, Alito expresses his concern that, “left unchecked,” “States will have every incentive to bring third-party suits on behalf of their residents to obtain a broader scope of equitable relief than any individual resident could procure in his own suit.”

He adds, “district courts should not view today’s decision as an invitation to certify nationwide classes without scrupulous adherence to the rigors of Rule 23,” referring to the federal procedural rule for class action lawsuits.

Kavanaugh filed a concurring opinion to assert the Supreme Court’s authority “as the ultimate decider of the interim legal status of major new federal statutes and executive actions.”

“When a stay or injunction application arrives here, this Court should not and cannot hide in the tall grass,” Kavanaugh asserts. “When we receive an application, we must grant or deny. And when we do…that decision will often constitute a form of precedent…that provides guidance throughout the United States during the years-long interim period until a final decision on the merits.”

FOR NATIONWIDE INJUNCTIONS

Justice Sonia Sotomayor delivered the principal dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Sotomayor points out that the government, by asking for partial instead of complete stays of the injunctions, has circumvented the need to argue that the citizenship order is actually constitutional.

The government, she says, “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 cites the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause and extensive legal precedent, including U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (132), to demonstrate the “patent unlawfulness” of Trump’s order. She then reviews the plaintiffs’ arguments that they will be harmed by the denial of the “full privileges, rights and benefits” of citizenship to their children and the “significant administrative burdens” of state enforcement of the order.

She plainly rejects the government’s argument that it would suffer irreparable harm from not enforcing Trump’s order, writing, “the Executive Branch has respected birthright citizenship for well over a century, and it advances no plausible reason why maintaining the status quo while the litigation proceeds would cause it irrevocable harm.”

“By forging ahead and granting relief to the Government anyway, this Court endorses the radical proposition that the President is harmed, irreparably, whenever he cannot do something he wants to do, even if what he wants to do is break the law.”

“Suppose an executive order barred women from receiving unemployment benefits or black citizens from voting. Is the Government irreparably harmed, and entitled to emergency relief, by a district court order universally enjoining such policies? The majority, apparently, would say yes.”

She goes on to assert that English courts, early American courts, and later federal courts “could award injunctive and other equitable relief to parties and nonparties alike,” establishing a sufficient historical analogue. She points out that these injunctions can potentially restrict “the legal dialogue” by blocking courts from considering the same issue in parallel, as well as encouraging forum or judge shopping, but says that this case does not suffer from those issues.

These injunctions, after all, protect newborns from the exceptional, irreparable harm associated with losing a foundational constitutional right and its immediate benefits.

— Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Principal Dissent

Responding to Barrett’s assertion that plaintiffs can resort to class actions instead, Sotomayor says, “Universal injunctions also cannot supplant the paradigm form of class actions, which seek money damages.”

She writes that the “relative absence of universal injunctions” was a matter of “constitutional and procedural limitations on judicial power, not equitable ones,” noting that a 1976 law allowed suits against Cabinet officials to be brought anywhere instead of only in Washington, D.C.

On the flip side of what several conservative colleagues cautioned against, Sotomayor writes that “the principle of complete relief does not require courts to award only the absolute narrowest injunction possible.” She says that courts have “discretion and judgment” in considering injunctive relief and must account for “what is workable.”

Discussing practical concerns, Sotomayor writes that children stand to “lose, at least for the time being, ‘a most precious right’” and even “the chance to participate in American society altogether, unless their parents have sufficient resources to file individual suits or successfully challenge the Citizenship Order in removal proceedings.”

“Worse yet, the Order threatens to render American-born children stateless.”

“Those newborns could face deportation, even as their parents remain lawfully in the country.”

In response to Kavanaugh’s opinion, she notes that the Supreme Court derives its equitable powers from the same place as lower courts, commenting that the Court may not even have the power to order the president to “completely and permanently” cease unconstitutional conduct “as to anyone not formally a party before the Court.”

She comments that class certification as a “higher cost,” requiring numerosity, commonality, typicality, and adequacy—bars that court rulings have repeatedly raised. Nevertheless, she advises the plaintiffs to file class-action lawsuits immediately.

“With the stroke of a pen, the President has made a ‘solemn mockery’ of our Constitution. Rather than stand firm, the Court gives way.”

Jackson filed a dissenting opinion, expressing concerns that the majority has decided “to endorse the creation of a zone of lawlessness within which the Executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes.”

“Even if the majority is correct that courts in England at the time of the founding were so limited—and I have my doubts—why would courts in our constitutional system be limited in the same way?” Jackson writes, calling the majority’s legalese a “smokescreen” and asserting that the fundamental duty of the judiciary is “to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

Jackson says that the government seeks the Court’s approval to create a second zone where anyone not “in the good graces of the Executive” will not be subject to the Constitution, calling it “anathema to the rule of law.”

“I now observe that [the majority’s] response also erroneously suggests that a court does something wrongful when it imposes a universal injunction in a single plaintiff’s lawsuit—akin to giving a windfall to those who do not deserve the law’s protection because they have not sued.”

“Rather than having a governing system characterized by protected rights, the default becomes an Executive that can do whatever it wants to whomever it wants, unless and until each affected individual affirmatively invokes the law’s protection,” Jackson reasons.

Jackson warns that the Court’s ruling has further eroded the judiciary as a check on the power of the executive branch.

“What the majority has done is allow the Executive to nullify the statutory and constitutional rights of the uncounseled, the underresourced, and the unwary, by prohibiting the lower courts from ordering the Executive to follow the law across the board.”

“Make no mistake: Today’s ruling allows the Executive to deny people rights that the Founders plainly wrote into our Constitution, so long as those individuals have not found a lawyer or asked a court in a particular manner to have their rights protected.”

IMPLICATIONS

The jury is still out on whether or not this ruling will create a patchwork of federal law where a baby’s citizenship would depend on where they were born, since the Court left open the possibility for court orders applicable nationwide in the cases of class-action lawsuits.

In the White House briefing room, Trump called the ruling a “monumental victory” for the separation of powers and the rule of law.

“Instead of merely ruling on the immediate cases before them, these attempts have attempted to dictate the law for the entire nation,” Trump said. “In practice, this meant that if any one of the nearly 700 federal judges disagreed with the policy of a duly-elected president of the United States, he or she could block that policy from going into effect or at least delay it for many years.”

The case’s plaintiffs immediately filed class-action lawsuits and moved for preliminary injunctive relief.

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