US Supreme Court ruling blocks nationwide injunctions in birthright citizenship issue

A federal district court can’t issue nationwide injunctions blocking executive branch actions, according to an opinion issued Friday (June 27) by the U.S. Supreme Court. The opinion, praised by the Trump administration, opens the door to ending birthright citizenship granted under the 14th Amendment.

The opinion follows a challenge by the Trump administration to three U.S. District Court actions that blocked enforcement of President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to limit the reach of the 14th Amendment which grants citizenship to any person born in the United States.

The first section of the 14th Amendment notes: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The amendment was approved in July 1868, and was part of “Reconstruction Amendments” following the U.S. Civil War.

President Trump praised the ruling, saying it ended a “colossal abuse of power” by the federal court system. He said he will now pursue the effort to end birthright citizenship, which he said was a right intended only “for the babies of slaves” and not people who now want to “scam” the system.

Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote the 6-3 majority opinion, said nationwide injunctions are a modern practice that has been abused by the judiciary to limit the actions of the other two branches of government.

“The bottom line? The universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our Nation’s history. Its absence from 18th- and 19th-century equity practice settles the question of judicial authority,” she noted.

Barrett also pushed back against a lengthy dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Barrett wrote. “We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary. No one disputes that the Executive has a duty to follow the law. But the Judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation—in fact, sometimes the law prohibits the Judiciary from doing so.”

Jackson, in her dissent, noted: “Make no mistake: Today’s ruling allows the Executive to deny people rights that the Founders plainly wrote into our Constitution, so long as those individuals have not found a lawyer or asked a court in a particular manner to have their rights protected. This perverse burden shifting cannot co-exist with the rule of law. In essence, the Court has now shoved lower court judges out of the way in cases where executive action is challenged, and has gifted the Executive with the prerogative of sometimes disregarding the law.”

Court watchers noted that Friday’s ruling opens the door for a wide range of presidential actions, including allowing a president to issue an executive order banning all automatic weapons. Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted this in her dissent in which she said the ruling is “an open invitation” for the executive branch to ignore the Constitution.

“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” Sotomayor wrote. “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.”