WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court dramatically scaled back lower courts’ authority to freeze presidential orders facing legal challenge – even those a judge views as unconstitutional – in a ruling Friday that centered on an effort to end automatic birthright citizenship.

President Donald Trump’s order reinterpreting the concept declared that children with at least one parent in the country illegally or temporarily are not entitled to U.S. citizenship – a stance at odds with previous Supreme Court rulings on the meaning of the 14th Amendment.

Federal district court judges in three states issued nationwide injunctions, prompting the administration to seek emergency review by the high court.

The justices voted 6 to 3 to lift the injunctions against Trump’s order, except as it relates to the specific plaintiffs in those three cases – a major, if potentially temporary, victory for the president.

The court also clamped down on the use of so-called “universal” injunctions by lower courts – temporary halts on executive action pending the outcome of a case.

“When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the ruling, joined by the other conservatives. [Decision: Trump v. CASA, Inc.]

Trump’s order will take effect in 30 days. After that, a newborn without at least one parent lawfully present in the U.S. will not receive automatic citizenship.

In a dissent by the three liberals, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that under this ruling, “no right is safe” because a president could violate the Constitution knowing the judiciary would be unable to effectively or quickly step in.

“Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship,” she wrote. “Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship.”

Fellow liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing separately, underscored the point. “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 wrote.

The majority held that injunctions should apply only to the specific plaintiffs.

“Prohibiting enforcement of the Executive Order against the child of an individual pregnant plaintiff will give that plaintiff complete relief,” the majority stated, adding, “Extending the injunction to cover all other similarly situated individuals would not render her relief any more complete.”

Shortly after the ruling, Trump said the Supreme Court had “delivered a monumental victory for the Constitution, the separation of powers and the rule of law.”

He noted that judges have issued more nationwide injunctions against him than against presidents in the entire 20th Century – a “colossal abuse of power” that had become a “grave threat to democracy.”

“I was elected on a historic mandate,” he told reporters at the White House, flanked by Attorney General Pam Bondi, “but in recent months we have seen a handful of radical left judges effectively try to overrule the rightful powers of the president to stop the American people from getting the policies that they voted for in record numbers.”

The Supreme Court left open the possibility of broad protections against executive orders through class action lawsuits.

Rep. Eli Crane, R-Oro Valley, called the decision a major victory for the Constitution and the will of the American people. Rep. Andy Biggs of Gilbert, who is running to be the next GOP nominee for governor, celebrated the slapdown of “activist judges.”

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, vowed to press ahead with efforts to overturn Trump’s “blatantly unconstitutional” order. Arizona is one of 22 states that challenged Trump’s order.

His “attack on the 14th Amendment would cause mass chaos and harm,” Mayes said in a statement. “We cannot allow the Trump administration’s illegal actions … to stand.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, called the decision to narrow lower courts’ ability to block illegal executive actions “an unprecedented and terrifying step toward authoritarianism.”

Federal judges in Washington state, Maryland and Massachusetts issued nationwide injunctions halting implementation of the birthright citizenship order.

But the case held implications for many other Trump policies.

During the first 100 days of his second term, federal judges issued nationwide injunctions halting enforcement of 25 presidential orders – including orders to fire federal workers, end deportation protection for many migrants, and cut foreign aid, research grants and funding for diversity, equity and inclusion programs and gender-affirming care.

Until now the Supreme Court had never ruled directly on lower courts’ authority to issue nationwide injunctions.

Such court orders were uncommon until after 1976, when President Gerald Ford signed a law that for the first time generally waived the U.S. government’s immunity from being sued.

The administration argued that lower courts lack the power to issue such nationwide or “universal” injunctions.

Because litigants often go forum-shopping to find a sympathetic judge, the Justice Department argued, lower courts should have the authority to apply orders only to the specific plaintiffs who challenge a presidential order.

“A universal injunction can be justified only as an exercise of equitable authority, yet Congress has granted federal courts no such power,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a concurring opinion.

Trump issued the birthright citizenship order the day of his inauguration, January 20.

Immigrant rights groups and 22 states challenged it before it took effect on grounds that it violated both the Constitution’s 14th Amendment and a 1898 landmark ruling on birthright citizenship.

The first clause of the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, states: “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 1898 case involved a man named Wong Kim Ark who was born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrants. His parents lived in the U.S. for 20 years. After they returned to China, he went to visit and was denied re-entry on grounds he was not an American citizen.

The Supreme Court ruled that regardless of ancestry, Wong and anyone else born on U.S. soil becomes a citizen automatically – affirming the right of birthright citizenship.

Sotomayor’s dissent reviewed the Wong ruling and others that reaffirmed the principle. “This Court’s precedent establishes beyond a shade of doubt that the Executive Order is unconstitutional,” she wrote.

Friday’s ruling sidestepped the validity of Trump’s redefinition of birthright citizenship.

At oral arguments, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer asserted that the 14th Amendment was intended to guarantee citizenship to former slaves, not to the children of people who had entered the country temporarily or illegally.

Yael Schacher, director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International, said the implications of Trump’s order would be “catastrophic.”

“It would have devastating impacts on refugees, asylum seekers, and their families,” she said by phone. “They would be stateless, potentially subject to deportation back to danger. It would be horrific.”

Presidents of both parties have faced nationwide injunctions from federal judges in recent years but Trump has been especially aggressive with his executive orders and has faced far more setbacks.

There were 64 such injunctions during Trump’s first term, according to an analysis published last year in the Harvard Law Review, compared to just six for George W. Bush and 12 for Barack Obama during their two-term presidencies.

According to the Congressional Research Service, there were 28 during President Joe Biden’s term, halting policies related to immigration, environmental protections and stimulus payments.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a federal judge blocked a Biden order requiring vaccination or testing for large employers. In 2022, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan after a lower court refused to do so.

“This is not new. The conservatives tried to use nationwide injunctions to shut down all of Biden’s student loan cancellation issues,” said constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein.

In April 2023, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed judge in Amarillo, Texas, issued an order barring distribution nationwide of mifepristone, a drug used in nearly two-thirds of abortions.

Hours later, a judge in Washington state who was appointed by Democrat Barack Obama Judge Thomas Rice, granted a “dueling injunction” at the request of 17 states and the District of Columbia.

Senate Republicans tried unsuccessfully to include a provision in the pending “One Big Beautiful Bill” – Trump’s domestic policy agenda – to prohibit nationwide injunctions unless plaintiffs posted a bond as hefty as $1 billion to cover the government’s potential damages.

At least five of the court’s nine current justices – across the ideological spectrum – had aired concern about universal injunctions before oral arguments May 15 in the birthright citizenship case.

“It just can’t be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks for the years it takes to go through the normal process,” liberal Justice Elena Kagan told students at Northwestern Law School in 2022, though she joined Friday’s dissent.

When the court upheld Trump’s travel ban on certain countries in 2018, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion that “universal injunctions are legally and historically dubious.” In 2020, Thomas joined with Gorsuch in a concurring opinion that called the routine issuance of such injunctions “patently unworkable.”

Fellow conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh had expressed similar views.

According to John Banzhaf, an emeritus professor of public interest law at George Washington University, going forward the only way to obtain a nationwide injunction against a presidential order would be through a federal class action lawsuit.

That would require a “qualified plaintiff in each of the 50 states,” he said by phone. “Needless to say, that would be a monumental task.”

Congress could still revive lower courts’ ability to temporarily freeze executive orders, Banzhaf said. Among those: empowering panels of judges to impose such injunctions, setting time limits on injunctions or allowing expedited appeals.

This decision “is not necessarily the final word regarding court actions to stop potentially illegal actions,” he wrote.

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Note: This story originally appeared on Cronkite News. It is published via a Creative Commons license. Cronkite News is produced by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

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