Supreme Court Limits Lower Courts’ Power to Block Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order

27 Jun 2025, 15:01 by Nik Popli · TIME

The Supreme Court on Friday handed a major victory to President Donald Trump by making it harder for courts to block his executive orders nationwide, including his proposal to end automatic birthright citizenship, a signature piece of his second-term policy agenda.

In a 6-to-3 decision by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Court backed a request by the Trump Administration to limit the authority of federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions, a powerful tool by which Trump's opponents have been able to halt many of his policies in recent months. The conservative majority argued that such injunctions “likely exceed” the power that Congress has granted to district judges since they go beyond providing relief to plaintiffs.

The outcome could dramatically reshape how citizenship is granted in the United States by allowing dozens of states to adopt Trump’s order that seeks to end the automatic granting of citizenship to babies born in the United States from parents who are in the country illegally. Barrett’s ruling, however, left open the possibility that Trump’s birthright policy could be blocked nationwide under lawsuits brought by state governments, or class-action litigation to challenge the order on behalf of groups of plaintiffs who would be affected by the order.

“Some say that the universal injunction ‘give[s] the Judiciary a powerful tool to check the Executive Branch,'” Barrett wrote, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. “But federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them. When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor read a summary of her dissent from the bench, calling the opinion a “travesty” and warning it would “cause chaos for the families of all affected children.” Immigrant rights groups, legal advocates, and Democrats in Congress described the ruling as an abdication of the judiciary’s role to protect Americans when a President violates the Constitution, warning that it would erode long-settled legal protections for U.S.-born children of non-citizens.

While the Justices sidestepped the core constitutional question at the heart of the controversy—whether the children of undocumented immigrants born on U.S. soil are entitled to citizenship under the 14th Amendment—the ruling weakens the key legal tool that lower court judges had previously used to stall the Administration’s immigration agenda—and may open the door to new, state-by-state battles over one of the most deeply rooted principles in American law. The Supreme Court’s ruling kept Trump’s ban on hold for at least 30 days and sent a set of cases back to the lower courts to determine next steps.

Trump, who often complains about individual judges holding up his agenda, celebrated the Supreme Court’s ruling at a surprise press briefing flanked by Attorney General Pam Bondi and Solicitor General John Sauer, calling the decision a “monumental victory for the Constitution, the separation of powers, and the rule of law.”

“This case is very important,” he said, referring to his executive order that could reshape the country’s immigration framework. “I was elected on a historic mandate, but in recent months, we've seen a handful of radical left judges effectively try to overrule the rightful powers of the President to stop the American people from getting the policies that they voted for in record numbers.”

Trump’s executive order, issued on his first day back in office, called for denying citizenship to the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors, a dramatic departure from more than a century of legal interpretation. The order specified that only children with at least one U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident parent would be considered citizens at birth.

Law experts argue that the policy directly contradicts the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, which states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.” The Supreme Court has previously upheld this clause as conferring citizenship to nearly all children born on American soil—a position most legal scholars consider settled law since the Court’s landmark 1898 ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark.

Twenty-two Democratic-led states, immigrant advocacy groups, and a group of pregnant women challenged Trump’s order in federal courts in Washington state, Maryland, and Massachusetts, where judges swiftly issued preliminary injunctions blocking the policy nationwide. But the Supreme Court’s ruling means that those cases will now return to those lower courts, where those judges will have to decide how to tailor their orders to comply with the high court ruling, Barrett’s opinion said.

The majority opinion faulted the lower courts for applying their injunctions beyond the plaintiffs in the case, preventing the Trump Administration from moving forward with several policy priorities.

“Thanks to this decision, we can now properly file to proceed with these numerous policies and those that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis,” Trump said, “including birthright citizenship, ending sanctuary city funding, suspending refugee resettlement, freezing unnecessary funding, stopping federal taxpayers from paying for transgender surgeries and numerous other priorities.”

The decision follows years of mounting frustration among Republican and Democratic administrations alike, as nationwide injunctions have increasingly been used to derail executive policies before higher courts could weigh in. For Trump, whose administration has aggressively tested the bounds of executive authority on issues from immigration to civil rights, such injunctions have posed frequent obstacles.

During oral arguments, Sauer argued on behalf of the Trump Administration that nationwide injunctions are unconstitutional and that the lower counts should have only been able to block Trump’s order in relation to those who had filed lawsuits. He said only the Supreme Court could rule on the constitutionality of the executive order for the entire country, and that the Trump Administration has faced an especially high number of such rulings: federal judges have issued 40 nationwide injunctions since the start of Trump's second term, and that 35 have come from the same five judicial districts.

The Justices appeared divided not only on the issue of injunctions but also on whether the case was the right vehicle to revisit the birthright citizenship question. Some members of the court signaled interest in eventually addressing the constitutional merits, though the Justices were not asked to do so in this case. The Justice Department did not seek a fast-track ruling on the legality of Trump’s order, focusing instead on narrowing the injunctions.

In dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that the ruling was "an existential threat to the rule of law,” while Sotomayor added that Trump’s birthright citizenship order has been deemed “patently unconstitutional” by every court that examined it.

“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.”

“The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the Government makes no attempt to hide it,” Sotomayor added. “Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along.”

Shortly after the Supreme Court’s ruling, two new class-action lawsuits challenging Trump’s birthright citizenship order were filed, including one by CASA Inc., an organization representing some of the plaintiffs, and the other by the ACLU.

“These are scary times, but we are not powerless,” says George Escobar, CASA’s Chief of Programs and Services. “We have shown in the past, and we continue to show that when we fight, we win.”