Topline
The Supreme Court broadly gave President Donald Trump a win Friday in its first major case over his agenda, as the court limited lower court judges’ ability to block his policies nationwide, though the court side-stepped the question of whether his policy restricting birthright citizenship is constitutional.
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters on the South Lawn at the White House on June 15.
The Supreme Court issued its ruling in Trump v. CASA Inc., a case consolidating several lawsuits against Trump’s executive order, which reverses longstanding Constitutional precedent to bar children born in the U.S. from automatically getting citizenship at birth if their parents aren’t U.S. citizens or permanent residents.
The president asked justices to more broadly rule on whether federal judges representing a single state or region can impose injunctions that block a policy nationwide, meaning courts would not be able to unilaterally block his agenda going forward unless the Supreme Court rules.
The court punted on the question of whether the birthright citizenship rule is lawful, but ruled 6-3 along party lines that lower courts cannot block policies nationwide and can only issue rulings that will provide relief solely to the parties who brought the lawsuit, saying “Congress has granted federal courts no such power” to issue nationwide orders.
Courts “do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch” but rather just “resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the court’s majority opinion, arguing, “When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”
The ruling broadly means that lower court judges will be restricted in how they can address Trump’s policies, including in the birthright citizenship case, as the court did not invalidate the executive order, but limited existing court rulings that block it nationwide.
The court gave a win to the Trump administration as officials have repeatedly complained about federal judges blocking the president’s policies and claimed judges are abusing their power and are biased against him politically.
In her dissent against the court’s ruling, Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused the court’s majority of “disregard[ing] basic principles of equity” and committing a “grave ... attack on our system of law.” “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 lawabiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship,” Sotomayor wrote, arguing the court’s ruling “renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit.”
The decision is the first major ruling by the Supreme Court on Trump’s second-term policies. While justices have now issued a number of rulings regarding Trump policies on its “shadow docket”—meaning it issues quicker rulings on issues without taking them up for oral argument first—the birthright citizenship dispute will mark the first time since Inauguration Day that justices held arguments regarding a Trump policy and then issued an opinion. But it’s unlikely to be the last: hundreds of lawsuits have been brought against the Trump administration in the months since Trump took office, and the court is expected to make the final call in a number of major disputes on everything from immigration to the economy. A group of small businesses asked the court in mid-June to take up Trump’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs and whether they’re lawful, after lower courts blocked the tariffs but appeals courts then put them back into effect while the litigation moves forward. Plaintiffs have asked the Supreme Court to hold oral arguments over Trump tariffs right after its next term starts in the fall, and while the court rejected that request to expedite the case, it still could take up the dispute.
More than 90. That’s the approximate number of preliminary injunctions that have been issued against the Trump administration since Inauguration Day, including the ones on Trump’s birthright citizenship order that prompted the dispute at the Supreme Court. That number only includes injunctions, which keep a policy on hold while a case moves forward, and does not include quicker temporary restraining orders, which judges use to immediately block a policy while they deliberate on whether to issue a more lasting order. Judges have also issued numerous temporary restraining orders against the Trump administration, which have similarly applied nationwide.
While the Supreme Court has only issued one ruling on the Trump administration’s policies after hearing oral arguments, the court’s quicker “shadow docket” rulings have largely come out in favor of the president. The court has so far ruled 14 times on Trump administration policies, not including the birthright citizenship case. Of those, the 6-3 conservative court has ruled in the Trump administration’s favor nine times, while only three cases have come out against him. Another two rulings have been mixed, with aspects of it both for and against Trump. That being said, Trump has still stewed over the Supreme Court justices he appointed in his first term not being as favorable to him as he hoped, CNN reported in early June, with anonymous sources saying the president has expressed “particular ire” at Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Trump’s birthright citizenship order was one of the first the president issued after his inauguration, after Trump long suggested he could take aim at the policy as part of his wider immigration crackdown. The executive order sparked a number of lawsuits and the first district and appeals court rulings of Trump’s second terms, with judges broadly decrying Trump’s effort to change the longstanding Constitutional protection. “The president cannot change, limit, or qualify this Constitutional right via an executive order,” Judge John Coughenour wrote in his ruling blocking the policy. As more court rulings against the president followed, with judges blocking other policies nationwide, the Trump administration and its allies increasingly started taking aim at judges, claiming they were abusing their authority to usurp the president’s agenda and claiming judges have been harsher on Trump than courts were on other previous presidents. They also started specifically complaining about judges imposing orders that went beyond their districts: White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt decried Judge James Boasberg for blocking the Trump administration from halting deportation flights to El Salvador, for instance, claiming, “A single judge in a single city cannot direct the movements of an aircraft carrier full of foreign alien terrorists who were physically expelled from U.S. soil.” In addition to the Trump administration taking the issue to the Supreme Court, Trump’s allies in Congress have also sought to solve the issue of lower courts issuing nationwide injunctions, introducing legislation that would prohibit judges’ ability to issue orders beyond the region their court covers. That bill is unlikely to become law, however, given it would need 60 votes in the narrowly divided Senate.