In win for Trump, Supreme Court limits judges' power to block birthright citizenship order

The US Supreme Court dealt a blow on Friday to the power of federal judges by restricting their ability to grant broad legal relief in cases as the justices acted in a fight over President Donald Trump's bid to limit birthright citizenship, ordering lower courts that blocked his policy to reconsider the scope of their orders.

However, the court's 6-3 ruling, authored by conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, did not let Trump's policy go into effect immediately and did not address the policy's legality.

The justices granted a request by the Trump administration to narrow the scope of three nationwide injunctions issued by federal judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington state that halted enforcement of his directive while litigation challenging the policy plays out.

With the court's conservatives in the majority and its liberals dissenting, the ruling specified that Trump's executive order cannot take effect until 30 days after Friday's ruling. The ruling thus raises the prospect of Trump's order eventually taking effect in some parts of the country.

Federal judges have taken steps including issuing numerous nationwide orders impeding Trump's aggressive use of executive action to advance his agenda. The three judges in the birthright citizenship cases found that Trump's order likely violates citizenship language in the Constitution's 14th Amendment.

"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," Barrett wrote.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent joined by the court's other two liberal members, wrote, "The majority ignores entirely whether the President's executive order is constitutional, instead focusing only on the question whether federal courts have the equitable authority to issue universal injunctions. Yet the order's patent unlawfulness reveals the gravity of the majority's error and underscores why equity supports universal injunctions as appropriate remedies in this kind of case."

Trump welcomed the ruling and criticised judges who have issued nationwide orders thwarting his policies.

"It was a grave threat to democracy, frankly, and instead of merely ruling on the immediate cases before them, these judges have attempted to dictate the law for the entire nation," Trump told reporters at the White House, describing these judges as "radical left."

On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to refuse to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States who do not have at least one parent who is an American citizen or lawful permanent resident, also called a "green card" holder.

More than 150,000 newborns would be denied citizenship annually under Trump's directive, according to the plaintiffs who challenged it, including the Democratic attorneys general of 22 states as well as immigrant rights advocates and pregnant immigrants.

The case before the Supreme Court was unusual in that the administration used it to argue that federal judges lack the authority to issue nationwide, or "universal," injunctions, and asked the justices to rule that way and enforce the president's directive even without weighing its legal merits.

In her dissent, Sotomayor said Trump's executive order is obviously unconstitutional. So rather than defend it on the merits, she wrote, the Justice Department "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."

Friday's ruling did not rule out all forms of broad relief.

A key part of the ruling said judges may provide "complete relief" only to the plaintiffs before them. It did not foreclose the possibility that states might need an injunction that applies beyond their borders to obtain complete relief.
"We decline to take up those arguments in the first instance," Barrett wrote.

The ruling left untouched the potential for plaintiffs to also did not a separate path for wider relief through class action lawsuits, but that legal mechanism is often harder to successfully mount.

Sotomayor advised parents of children who would be affected by Trump's order "to file promptly class action suits and to request temporary injunctive relief for the putative class."

Just two hours after the Supreme Court ruled, lawyers for the plaintiffs in the Maryland case filed a motion seeking to have a judge who previously blocked Trump's order to grant class action status to all children who would be ineligible for birthright citizenship if the executive order takes effect.

"The Supreme Court has now instructed that, in such circumstances, class-wide relief may be appropriate," the lawyers wrote in their motion.

'ILLEGAL AND CRUEL'

The American Civil Liberties Union called the ruling troubling, but limited, because lawyers can seek additional protections for potentially affected families.

"The executive order is blatantly illegal and cruel. It should never be applied to anyone," said Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project. "The court's decision to potentially open the door to enforcement is disappointing, but we will do everything in our power to ensure no child is ever subjected to the executive order."

The plaintiffs argued that Trump's directive ran afoul of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War of 1861-1865 that ended slavery in the United States. The 14th Amendment's citizenship clause states that 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."

The administration contends that the 14th Amendment, long understood to confer citizenship to virtually anyone born in the United States, does not extend to immigrants who are in the country illegally or even to immigrants whose presence is lawful but temporary, such as university students or those on work visas.

Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown, whose state helped secure the nationwide injunction issued by a judge in Seattle, called Friday's ruling "disappointing on many levels" but stressed that the justices "confirmed that courts may issue broad injunctions when needed to provide complete relief to the parties."

Reuters