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The United States Supreme Court has ruled that lower courts likely overstepped their authority in issuing nationwide injunctions against presidential actions, limiting the ability of the judicial branch to check executive power.
Friday’s decision came in response to injunctions from federal courts in Washington, Maryland and Massachusetts, which sought to block President Donald Trump’s ability to curtail the right to birthright citizenship.
“Universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts,” the court’s majority said in its decision. “The Court grants the Government’s applications for a partial stay of the injunctions.”
But the majority added that its decision applies “only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary”. The injunctions could still apply, the court suggested, to the plaintiffs in the cases at hand.
The ruling split the court once again along party lines, with its six conservative judges forming the majority and its three liberal judges issuing a dissent. Amy Coney Barrett, the court’s newest judge and a Trump appointee, penned the majority’s decision.
The Supreme Court’s decision was a major victory for the Trump administration, which has denounced “judicial overreach” as an unconstitutional obstacle to its policies. It will likely have wide-ranging ramifications for other cases where Trump’s agenda has been blocked by lower-court injunctions.
“Today, the Supreme Court instructed district courts to STOP the endless barrage of nationwide injunctions against President Trump,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on the social media platform X.
Trump himself celebrated the decision on his platform Truth Social: “GIANT WIN in the United States Supreme Court!”
The Supreme Court’s ruling, however, did not allow Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship to come into immediate effect.
It provided a 30-day period before Trump’s order could be applied and ordered the lower courts to bring their injunctions in line with the new decision. Class action appeals are expected to be filed within that window.
How did this case arrive at the Supreme Court?
Lower courts had come out strongly against Trump’s efforts to redefine birthright citizenship, a right established under the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, which was adopted in the wake of the US Civil War.
The amendment declared that “all persons born” in the US and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” would be citizens.
The courts have repeatedly interpreted that text as granting citizenship to nearly all people born in the US, regardless of their parents’ nationalities. There were limited exceptions, including for the children of diplomats.
But in his 2024 re-election bid, Trump campaigned on a platform that would see the Fourteenth Amendment reinterpreted to exclude the children of undocumented immigrants.
The new policy, his platform said, “will make clear that going forward, the children of illegal aliens will not be granted automatic citizenship”.
On the first day of his second term, January 20, he followed through on that campaign promise, signing an executive order called, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship”.
But immigration advocates said that Trump’s policy violated the Constitution and could render some children stateless. Lower courts sided with them, issuing nationwide injunctions that barred the executive order from taking effect.
Injunctions are often used to grant relief to plaintiffs who might otherwise face immediate and irreparable harm from an action that might otherwise occur.
What did the Supreme Court majority say?
In Friday’s decision, the Supreme Court sidestepped making any decisions about the constitutionality of Trump’s proposed interpretation of birthright citizenship.
Instead, it focused specifically on the federal court injunctions that would stymie the president’s executive orders.
The decision came on the last day of the Supreme Court’s 2024-2025 term, when big decisions are often unveiled.
Writing for the majority, Justice Coney Barrett advanced an argument with threads of originalism, saying that the judicial system had strayed from its original mandate with such wide-reaching injunctions.
“Nothing like a universal injunction was available at the founding, or for that matter, for more than a century thereafter,” she wrote.
Coney Barrett went on to describe a state of affairs where these binding, nationwide injunctions became more and more frequent, particularly by the end of the previous administration, under President Joe Biden.
She noted that, in the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, district courts issued approximately 25 universal injunctions.
“As the number of universal injunctions has increased, so too has the importance of the issue,” she wrote on behalf of the majority.
She asserted that injunctions historically had a more limited scope, pertaining to the specific parties involved in a lawsuit.
“Traditionally, courts issued injunctions prohibiting executive officials from enforcing a challenged law or policy only against the plaintiffs in the lawsuit,” Coney Barrett wrote.
“The injunctions before us today reflect a more recent development: district courts asserting the power to prohibit enforcement of a law or policy against anyone.”
She added that the executive branch, led by the president, “has a duty to follow the law” — but the judicial branch does not have “unbridled authority” to police it.
What did the Supreme Court’s dissent say?
The three left-leaning justices on the court, however, issued a blistering dissent, denouncing Friday’s decision from the majority as an unprecedented assault on the court system.
Writing on behalf of the dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that the court had sidestepped the real issue of the day: the constitutionality of birthright citizenship. That right, she explained, has been upheld again and again, even at the Supreme Court.
“As every conceivable source of law confirms, birthright citizenship is the law of the land,” she wrote.
Instead, by focusing on lower-court injunctions, Sotomayor argued that the Supreme Court had played into the Trump administration’s hands.
She said that the Trump administration’s focus on the injunctions alone allowed it to avoid a ruling that would strike down its executive order on birthright citizenship.
“The Government does not ask for complete stays of the injunctions, as it ordinarily does before this Court. Why? The answer is obvious: To get such relief, the Government would have to show that the Order is likely constitutional,” Sotomayor wrote.
“So the Government instead tries its hand at a different game. It 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 said universal injunctions were a necessary tool to protect large groups of people — like migrants or women — from the harmful effects of such policies. Universal injunctions, she explained, empowered “courts to do complete justice, including through flexible remedies”.
“By stripping all federal courts, including itself, of that power, the Court kneecaps the Judiciary’s authority to stop the Executive from enforcing even the most unconstitutional policies,” she wrote.
“Because I will not be complicit in so grave an attack on our system of law, I dissent.”
How has Donald Trump reacted?
Shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision was announced, Trump himself appeared in the White House press briefing room, to do a victory lap with reporters.
“Well, that was a big one,” he quipped at the opening of his remarks.
Trump has long accused the judges who blocked his policies of being part of the “radical left” and impeding the will of the voters who elected him. He repeated those accusations on Friday, calling the injunctions a “colossal abuse of power”.
“The Supreme Court has delivered a monumental victory for the Constitution, the separation of powers and the rule of law in striking down the excessive use of nationwide injunctions to interfere with the normal functioning of the executive branch,” Trump said.
“It was a grave threat to democracy, frankly, and instead of merely ruling on the immediate cases before them, these judges have attempted to dictate the law for the entire nation.”
Trump also framed the decision as paving the way for his executive order on birthright citizenship to take effect.
“This lets us go there and finally win that case because hundreds of thousands of people are pouring into our country under birthright citizenship,” he said. “And it wasn’t meant for that reason. It was meant for the babies of slaves.”
He then thanked each of the conservative judges by name. “They should be very proud.”
Attorney General Bondi signalled that the Supreme Court would decide the merits of Trump’s birthright citizenship policy in October.
