Supreme Court Rules With Trump On Birthright Citizenship Challenge

In a move that threatens to spark chaos throughout the country, the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday partially blocked a series of nationwide injunctions on President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order. 

The ruling was 6-3 and with fierce dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote Friday’s opinion.

“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates. Today the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship,” Sotomayor wrote, adding that “with the stroke of a pen, the President has made a solemn mockery of our Constitution.”

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The Supreme Court’s ruling aligns with arguments Solicitor General D. John Sauermade on behalf of the administration when he said that lower courts should not have such sweeping ability to put a check on the executive branch’s policymaking. 

Writing Friday’s opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett lamented the use of nationwide injunctions in recent years and took time to emphasize that in the first 100 days of Trump’s administration, at least 23 universal injunctions had been issued.

As legal experts recently pointed out to HuffPost, nationwide injunctions have long been a subject of fierce bipartisan debate: While they can be a tool to broadly protect the public’s rights against government overreach, they can also be a vehicle for a plaintiff who wants to politicize the judiciary by seeking out nationwide injunctions through forum shopping, or picking a specific district to sue in because the plaintiff suspects the courts will rule their way.

Instead of district courts being allowed to grant nationwide injunctions, the Trump administration argued the only relief that should be granted is to the specific person who sues in that venue.

Barrett agreed. The plaintiffs who challenged the order characterized injunctions as a way the court can grant relief broadly, but Barrett said, “the question is not whether an injunction offers complete relief to everyone potentially affected by an allegedly unlawful act; it is whether an injunction will offer complete relief to the plaintiffs before the court.” (Emphasis original)

“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. Extending the injunction to cover all other similarly situated individuals would not render her relief any more complete,” Barrett wrote.

The sentiment is similar to the position the high court has taken around deportations and habeas corpus issues: in short, individuals must bring their own unique, individual cases.

The majority’s decision appears to ignore inherent logistical difficulties that come for many plaintiffs and petitioners who lack resources to sue or simply cannot access courts.

In her dissent, Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson highlighted this fact.

“The wealthy and well connected will have little difficulty securing legal representation, going to court and obtaining injunctive relief in their own name if the Executive violates their rights,” Jackson wrote. “Consequently, the zone of lawlessness the majority has now authorized will disproportionately impact the poor, the uneducated, the unpopular — i.e. those who may not have the wherewithal to lawyer up, and will all too often find themselves beholden to the Executive’s whims. This is yet another crack in the foundation of the rule of law.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling did not discuss the merits of Trump’s birthright citizenship order, nor did it delve into the14th Amendment guarantee that anyone born on U.S. soil or within its territories is entitled to citizenship at birth. Nor did the majority’s ruling acknowledge over 100 years of precedent upholding that interpretation of the amendment, including the 1898 caseU.S. v. Wong Kim Arkwhich stated that children born in the U.S. to noncitizen parents are still considered U.S. citizens.) 

The court did not rule on those merits because the Trump administration did not present that question. Trump’s executive order formally takes effect in 30 days and since the merits of birthright itself were not decided by the court, legal challenges could continue.

Before giddily announcing a press conference for Friday afternoon, Trump celebrated on Truth Social.

“GIANT WIN in the United States Supreme Court! Even the Birthright Citizenship Hoax has been, indirectly, hit hard. It had to do with babies of slaves (same year!) not the SCAMMING of our Immigration process. Congratulations to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Solicitor General John Sauer, and the entire DOJ,” he wrote.

In the dissent from Sotomayor joined by Jackson and Justice Elena Kagan, the justices noted that “since the founding” of America, children born in the U.S. are U.S. citizens.

“That has been the legal rule since the founding, and it was the English rule well before then. This Court once attempted to repudiate it, holding in Dred Scott v. Sandford, that the children of enslaved black Americans were not citizens. To remedy that grievous error, the States passed in 1866 and Congress ratified in 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, which enshrined birthright citizenship in the Constitution. There it has remained, accepted and respected by Congress, by the Executive, and by this Court. Until today,” Jackson wrote.

What the Trump administration has done, the justice continued, is “gamesmanship” with the Constitution and the government makes “no attempt to hide it,” she added.

“Yet shamefully, this court plays along,” Jackson wrote.

Besides Washington, D.C., the states who sued to stop the order include California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin. 

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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