A Supreme Court ruling limiting the ability of judges to block White House policies will bring a wave of urgency and uncertainty to the federal courts, experts said, as plaintiffs pursue new ways of blocking President Trump’s agenda and judges sort out how to apply the court’s complex ruling.
On Friday, the Supreme Court ruled that district court judges likely exceeded their authority with so-called nationwide injunctions.
Also known as universal injunctions, they have been used by judges more than two dozen times to block pieces of Mr. Trump’s second-term agenda, including freezes on federal funding, changes to voting rules and limitations on birthright citizenship — all with the stroke of a pen.
Now, the justices ruled, the lower courts can only block government policies for “each plaintiff with standing to sue.”
Those plaintiffs can still win rulings that affect a large number of people, including, for example, everyone living in a state in a case brought by that state’s attorney general.
The justices also specified two exceptions to its new rule: class-action lawsuits, which can apply to groups of people in a similar legal situation, and cases brought under the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs executive branch rule-making and allows judges to block actions by agencies found to be “arbitrary” or “capricious.”
The result was a muddled picture, with the Trump administration and its adversaries rolling out competing readings of what is likely to happen next.
The White House framed the ruling as effectively giving a judicial green light to its entire agenda.
But hours later, Skye Perryman, the president of Democracy Forward, a legal group that has brought dozens of lawsuits against the administration and has won a number of nationwide injunctions, called the Supreme Court’s ruling “a very limited decision.” The ruling, she added, left open a number of options for plaintiffs who want the courts to block administration policies in their entirety.
Questions surrounding the ruling’s scope and interpretation will prompt more work for courts already burdened with the task of overseeing the many challenges to administration policies, scholars said.
“There will be more litigation, not less,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia.
What the Ruling Means for Birthright Citizenship
Friday’s ruling centered on decisions from three judges that blocked an executive order issued by the administration taking away automatic citizenship for babies born to undocumented immigrants and green card holders.
For more than a century, courts have held that the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” meant that anyone born in the United States was a citizen.
At a news conference Friday, Mr. Trump insisted that the amendment, which was ratified following the Civil War, was “meant for the babies of slaves.”
“It wasn’t meant for people trying to scam the system,” he added.
So far, lower courts have taken a different view, ruling that his executive order was likely unconstitutional. Two of the three lawsuits were brought by state attorneys general representing 22 states, most of them led by Democrats.
While the Supreme Court decision did not address the legality of Mr. Trump’s executive order, children born in other states could now stand to lose automatic citizenship, according to Nick Brown, Washington State’s attorney general and one of those who sued the Trump administration.
“If you are living in a state that did not participate in this coalition of action against the Trump administration, then your rights are in question,” he said on Friday at a news conference.
The court’s ruling acknowledged the possibility that it could lead to a “patchwork injunction” in which the rules governing citizenship would vary from state to state.
Mila Sohoni, a law professor at Stanford who filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, said the ruling “threatens to leave many newborns who are entitled to citizenship without any way to prove they are citizens.”
“Administrative complexity” and “unfairness” would result if parents had to provide proof of their legal status to obtain citizenship for a new baby, she said.
Still, the court noted that the executive order would not take effect for 30 days, allowing time for new legal challenges.
For instance, the Supreme Court’s ruling could lead to more pressure on state and local governments to join the 22 states that have sued the administration over the order, said David A. Super, a law professor at Georgetown University.
Because states “may be able to get relief for themselves, but no farther,” that “could induce more states and counties to join such suits rather than free-riding on those that do sue,” he said.
The decision could also lead to class action suits filed by new and expectant mothers whose babies’ citizenship would be at risk, in which they could seek an order protecting the citizenship of babies born to other mothers, as well. The first of those suits was filed on Friday in Federal District Court in Maryland.
Samuel L. Bray, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame and a critic of nationwide injunctions, said in a statement that he expected a “surge” of new lawsuits against Mr. Trump’s birthright order. Courts, he said, will continue to find it unconstitutional. “I do not expect the president’s executive order on birthright citizenship will ever go into effect,” he said.
Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University who has also studied nationwide injunctions, echoed Mr. Bray’s assessment, writing on social media that “lower courts will still be able to block the policy on a nationwide basis even after this ruling.”
What the Ruling Means for Other Cases
On Friday, Mr. Trump said the ruling could lead to the reinstatement of “numerous policies” that had been “wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis.”
He referred to a list of policies that had been blocked by the lower courts, including withholding federal funds from “sanctuary cities” that refuse to carry out mass deportations; ending programs that admit and process refugees; and cutting off taxpayer funding for health care providers that offer transgender care.
Exactly how the lower courts will apply the new Supreme Court ruling in other cases remains to be seen, and is likely to itself be the subject of further court battles.
Existing nationwide injunctions that bind the Trump administration will remain in place as judges consider whether there is a way to narrow them to a smaller group or geographic area without losing protections the injunctions have given plaintiffs.
Experts said that opponents of Mr. Trump’s actions would likely also flood the courts with class-action lawsuits to block orders dealing with issues beyond birthright citizenship. Some class-action cases have been used successfully to block Trump administration policies, such as restrictions on due process for migrants and transgender care for federal prisoners.
For a case to proceed as a class action, it must be “certified” by the court to find that the legal situations of a group’s members are sufficiently similar, and that the groups are too large for each member to seek personal representation.
The certification standard for large, diverse classes has also changed because of a Supreme Court ruling from 2011. The court found that five Walmart employees could not represent a class of more than a million others, because the larger group’s claims of employment discrimination were too varied.
Judith Resnik, a law professor at Yale, said the Supreme Court decision on Friday “unsettled” a longstanding consensus about U.S. citizenship, and that the justices’ concurrences signaled questions about the ability of states, and of class actions, to block White House policies.
That, she said, means that lower courts will have to address these issues.
“What’s next is a vast amount of frantic activity for individuals outside of courts, as well as for judges and lawyers,” she said.
Abbie VanSickle contributed reporting.
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