Supreme Court Hands Trump ‘GIANT WIN’ in Birthright Citizenship Case

The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that lower federal courts should not have the power to issue nationwide injunctions blocking presidential orders — no matter how obviously unconstitutional such an order may be.

The decision is a monumental gift to Donald Trump’s administration, which is seeking to implement much of its anti-immigration and other policy priorities through executive orders. The ruling was 6-3, with the court’s six conservative justices opting to restrict the power of the lower courts. 

The ruling comes in response to the Trump administration’s argument that the judiciary does not have the power to block the president’s executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship, a right enshrined in the Constitution. The Supreme Court’s ruling effectively restricts the injunctions that blocked the birthright citizenship order, and could potentially apply to other authoritarian actions by Trump and his administration that have been blocked by federal courts.

Trump was ecstatic. “GIANT WIN in the United States Supreme Court!” he wrote on Truth Social. “Even the Birthright Citizenship Hoax has been, indirectly, hit hard. It had to do with the 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.”

“Thanks to this decision, we can now promptly file to proceed with numerous policies that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis, and some of the cases we’re talking about would be ending birthright citizenship,” the president added at a news conference later on Friday.

The day he was inaugurated, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” which was intended to strip the children of non-citizen immigrants — regardless of their legal status — of the right to American citizenship if they were born in the United States. 

The effort is blatantly unconstitutional. The 15th Amendment guarantees citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The order was challenged in multiple lawsuits, and its implementation was quickly blocked by several district court judges across multiple states.
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In response, the Trump administration disregarded the question of the order’s constitutionality almost entirely, appealing to the Supreme Court on the grounds that the lower courts don’t actually have the right to issue nationwide injunctions against an executive policy. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal, called out the administration’s tactics in her dissent of Friday’s decision.

“The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the government makes no attempt to hide it,” she wrote. “Yet, shamefully, this court plays along.”

“No right is safe in the new legal regime the court creates,” Sotomayor continued. “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. The majority holds that, absent cumbersome class-action litigation, courts cannot completely enjoin even such plainly unlawful policies unless doing so is necessary to afford the formal parties complete relief. That holding renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit.”

During oral arguments in May, lawyers for the Justice Department argued that executive orders could not be blocked by the lower courts, and should be allowed to go into effect until something like a class-action lawsuit against a given policy makes its way to the Supreme Court. 
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“Your argument turns our justice system into a catch me if you can kind of regime from the standpoint of the executive where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said during one oral argument exchange with U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer.

The Supreme Court is controlled by conservatives, though, three of which Trump appointed in his first term. In the end, they agreed with the Justice Department.