WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court has given President Donald Trump a major win by severely limiting the nationwide injunctions that prevented him from putting into practice his executive orders ending birthright citizenship. The ruling restricts the issuing by lower courts of any broad restrictions on executive branch policies, a practice that has been a thorn in the side of an administration seemingly determined to kill democracy.
The justices said that judges can grant relief to the individuals or groups involved or named in specific lawsuits and cases but that the lower courts’ power to stop presidential policies does not extend to the entire country. That relief, under this ruling, is not available to and may not encompass other individuals unless they go through the complex and expensive process of filing lawsuits themselves or the even more laborious process of joining with others in a class-action case.
As Justice Katanji Brown Jackson has asserted in the past, this will allow injustice and illegal rulings to remain in effect indefinitely for many victims and also allow people who have protection in one state on the citizenship issue and other matters not to have that same protection in other states.
The ruling will leave many immigrant families who are expecting babies across the country desperately trying to figure out what to do and where to go as they scramble for safety and legal protection.
“The universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our nation’s history,” conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion allowing Trump’s executive orders to proceed.
The ruling Friday came in connection with three lawsuits in which judges granted nationwide injunctions against an executive order Trump signed on the first day of his second term seeking to deny American citizenship to children born in the U.S. to foreigners on short-term visas and those without “legal” status.
Lower court rulings said that Trump’s executive order was unconstitutional because it violates the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
The three liberal Supreme Court justices, opposing the six-judge right-wing majority, said the president’s directive is clearly illegal.
Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for children of immigrants could now become the rule in some states as a result of the Supreme Court ruling, bringing to life the worst fears and warnings expressed by Jackson.
“The Court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law,” Justice Jackson declared in her dissent.
She said the Trump administration’s “bid to vanquish so-called universal injunctions is, at bottom, a request for this Court’s permission to engage in unlawful activity.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who along with Justices Jackson and Elena Kagan was a dissenting vote, wrote that the ruling renders constitutional guarantees “meaningless.”
She declared that “No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates.” She said the ruling robs the lower courts of their power to protect people even in the face of plainly unlawful policies.
“With the stroke of a pen. The president has made a solemn mockery of our Constitution,” Sotomayor wrote. “The court’s decision is nothing less than an open invitation for the government to bypass the Constitution.”
The Court’s decision is a major win for Trump, who has endlessly complained about individual judges “tying up” his agenda. There have been more than two dozen nationwide injunctions against his mandates to date. He’s demanded impeachment of one of judge, District Judge James Boasberg, and the day before the High Court’s ruling, Trump’s Justice Department sued all 15 federal judges in Maryland, as a group, because of their injunctions blocking his edicts.
Defenders of democracy respond
CASA de Maryland, a civil rights group for Latino/Latina people, and the named “plaintiff” in the birthright citizenship case, had tackled the potential problems in a panel discussion even before the court’s ruling.
“I ask myself, ‘How did we get here?’ amidst the barrage of the Trump administration’s constitutional and human rights abuses,” said CASA’s policy director George Escobar. “Masked armed men refusing to identify themselves may seem like a headline from another time from a faraway country, but it’s happening every day in our community.”
“The Supreme Court has handed Trump the powers of a king,” Common Cause declared. “Each individual person Trump tries to illegally deport would need to bring their own lawsuit—even as ICE agents are abducting people and keeping them from talking to their lawyers.
The group said that Trump is essentially “free to violate millions of people’s constitutional rights, and nothing can stop him until a long court battle plays out.”
Rossana Cambron, co-chair of the Communist Party USA, has been participating for weeks in the mass demonstrations protesting Trump’s violent deportation raids in Los Angeles. Reacting to Friday’s ruling, she said it poses a danger on multiple fronts.
By banning nationwide injunctions and requiring every individual or group to file their own separate lawsuits when questions of citizenship status are involved, Cambron told People’s World it leaves “people who don’t have the financial resources or access to legal help to fend for themselves” against the Trump administration.
Beyond that, she said, “It’s important to remember that U.S. policy in other countries has constantly forced people to migrate.” People face economic and political oppression in their home countries, but then “in the U.S. they and even their children who are born here” are targeted again.
“This ruling betrays our most fundamental promise: that every child born on U.S. soil is an American, period,” said Roman Palomares, LULAC National President in a statement right after the ruling. “The Supreme Court may have chosen procedure over principle today, but LULAC will not stand by while babies born under our flag are stripped of their rightful place in our nation.”
Voto Latino President María Teresa Kumar said the decision gives the Trump administration more power to further its “extreme political agenda.”
Other rulings
The birthright citizenship case was the most closely-watched pending case, but there were also other rulings the justices issued on the final day of their term this year.
In another notable one, the court sided with parents in a Maryland school district who wanted to pull their children out of reading classes because the books covered LBGTQ families and issues. In the dissent, Sotomayor said the ruling will have a chilling effect. “Schools may instead censor their curricula, stripping material that risks generating religious objections,” she wrote, adding that the majority therefore “hands a subset of parents the right to veto curricular choices long left to locally elected school boards.”
A Texas case concerning the level of scrutiny the government can use to restrict access to adult material online was decided in favor of the state and against the porn companies who had filed suit. While targeting a politically vulnerable industry like pornography companies in this instance, First Amendment advocates warn that upholding the law opens the way to wider censorship in line with Republican ideology.
Kagan dissented to the ruling, saying excess “burden” should not be imposed “constitutionally protected speech” based on its content.
In a health care case, the Court decided to protect a key provision of the Affordable Care Act by a vote of 6-3, with three right-wing justices breaking ranks. Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas, known as one of the most far-right reactionaries in the federal court system, had blocked enforcement of the ACA’s preventative health care equirements.
His ruling, upheld by an appeals court, jeopardized access to everything from cancer screenings to immunizations, prenatal services to HIV prevention, pap smears to heart disease screenings, physical therapy for seniors to lung cancer screenings. O’Connor claimed that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which decides what health services will be covered by the ACA, was illegal and should therefore not exist.
The Supreme Court disagreed, marking the fourth time that a right-wing effort to overturn the ACA has failed at the highest judicial level.
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