The Trump administration scored a notable legal victory today when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that federal district judges “likely exceed” their authority when they issue nationwide injunctions that entirely block federal laws or presidential orders from going into effect while legal challenges play out in court.
The case, Trump v. CASA, arose from several lawsuits challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order purporting to abolish birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants and temporary legal visitors, such as people holding work visas. The federal district judges in those cases had issued nationwide injunctions against Trump’s order.
“But federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them,” declared the majority opinion of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, which was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. “When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully,” Barrett wrote, “the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”
Writing in dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, faulted the majority for worrying more about overreaching judges than about an overreaching president. “The majority ignores entirely whether the President’s Executive Order is constitutional, instead focusing only on the question of whether federal courts have the equitable authority to issue universal injunctions,” Sotomayor wrote. “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. As every conceivable source of law confirms, birthright citizenship is the law of the land.”
Barrett’s ruling took no position on the lawfulness of Trump’s executive order. Nor did it weigh in on the soundness of the district court rulings which found that Trump’s order had harmed the individual plaintiffs who filed the cases. In other words, the underlying constitutional dispute about whether or not Trump’s order violates the 14th Amendment was not revolved today. As Barrett put it, “the birthright citizenship issue is not before us.”
What Barrett’s ruling did do was to order the lower courts to make sure that their injunctions are not “broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue.”
So, if a pregnant woman successfully sues Trump over his executive order, the district court may still block Trump from denying birthright citizenship to her newborn. But, with nationwide injunctions now off the table, a different mother will now have to file a different lawsuit of her own to obtain the exact same relief for her newborn. Under this scenario, the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship will extend to some newborns but not to others, all depending on whether or not the parents were part of a lawsuit.
At the same time, Barrett’s ruling did leave open the availability of class-action lawsuits against Trump’s executive order. In fact, whether she meant to or not, Barrett effectively invited such suits by referring to nationwide injunctions as a “class-action workaround.”
In other words, if a class-action lawsuit can achieve similar results to the now-verboten nationwide injunction, we should probably expect a slew of class-actions to be filed immediately against Trump’s executive order. And we should also probably expect those class-actions to similarly block Trump’s order from going into wide effect while those suits play out.
One reason to think that this result will happen is because Justice Samuel Alito wrote a separate concurrence today in which he fretted about what he called the class-action “loophole.” According to Alito, “the universal injunction will return from the grave under the guise of ‘nationwide class relief,’ and today’s decision will be of little more than academic interest” if class-action suits are allowed to proliferate against Trump’s executive order.
In short, the fight over nationwide injunctions may be over for now, but the fight over class-action lawsuits against presidential orders is about to heat up.
