The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Friday in the controversial “birthright citizenship” case that lower courts cannot simply issue nationwide injunctions, and that doing so is an abuse of their judicial power.
The decision in Trump v. Casa vindicated the Department of Justice (DOJ) strategy of arguing against the idea of nationwide injunctions, rather than addressing the underlying substantive issue in the case — namely, the dispute over whether the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees citizenship upon birth. Conservatives argue that “birthright citizenship” is abused by illegal migrants to make their children into U.S. citizens, who can later sponsor the legal immigration of the rest of their families. They also argue that no other nation has birthright citizenship, and that the Fourteenth Amendment did not intend to create it.
Given a number of contrary rulings in lower courts, which slapped nationwide injunctions on President Donald Trump’s executive orders on the subject, the DOJ kept the focus of its challenge to the narrow issue of nationwide injunctions. Democrats, and to a lesser extent Republicans, have sued in friendly jurisdictions in recent years as a way of stopping administration policies that they do not have legislative votes to overturn.
In a originalist opinion written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the court’s conservative majority found: “Universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.”
Barrett wrote:
The Judiciary Act of 1789 endowed federal courts with jurisdiction over “all suits . . . in equity,” §11, 1 Stat. 78, and still today, this statute “is what authorizes the federal courts to issue equitable remedies,” S. Bray & E. Sherwin, Remedies 442 (4th ed. 2024). Though flexible, this equitable authority is not freewheeling. We have held that the statutory grant encompasses only those sorts of equitable remedies “traditionally accorded by courts of equity” at our country’s inception. … We must therefore ask whether universal injunctions are sufficiently “analogous” to the relief issued “‘by the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the enactment of the original Judiciary Act.’” Grupo Mexicano, 527 U. S., at 318–319 (quoting A. Dobie, Handbook of Federal Jurisdiction and Procedure 660 (1928)).
The answer is no: Neither the universal injunction nor any analogous form of relief was available in the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the founding. Equity offered a mechanism for the Crown “to secure justice where it would not be secured by the ordinary and existing processes of law.”
…
Nor did founding-era courts of equity in the United States chart a different course.
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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.
There were several concurring opinions, and a dissent joined by the Court’s three liberal justices, including a separate dissent by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has become the Court’s resident left-wing activist.
Jackson wrote:”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.” She derided the Court’s cited precedents in common law at the Founding as “inapt comparisons to impotent English tribunals.”
Barrett dismissed Jackson’s dissent sternly: “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. We observe only this: JUSTICE JACKSON decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”
Going forward, district courts will only be able to apply their judgments beyond the areas of their jurisdiction if the plaintiffs can file their complaints in the form of a class action, demonstrating common injuries.
Left-wing groups who relied on “forum-shopping” to find friendly judges in remote places who could stop national policies — part of an overall strategy of “Lawfare” — have now lost a key weapon in their arsenal.
The case is Trump v. Casa, U.S. Supreme Court, 8:25-cv-00201.
Update: Carrie Severino, of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, commented:
The Court has shut the door on the abuse of universal injunctions. Today’s decision is a victory for our constitutional separation of powers. Justice Alito’s concurrence sounds the alarm that litigants have been attempting to abuse class actions and standing processes as well and shows that the Court is well aware of the problem and prepared to police those boundaries to shut down judicial activists. Looks like a lot of people were crying wolf on Justice Barrett.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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