WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration to take steps to implement its proposal to end automatic birthright citizenship, handing a major win to the government.
The court granted a request by the Trump administration to narrow the scope of nationwide injunctions imposed by judges so that they apply only to states, groups and individuals that sued. That means the birthright citizenship proposal can likely move forward at least in part in the states that challenged it as well as those that did not.
The court was divided on ideological lines, with conservatives in the majority and liberals in dissent.
“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 for the majority.
But she indicated that the nationwide injunctions are limited “only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary.”
Lower courts, she added “shall move expeditiously” to figure out how broad the injunctions can be.
In dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the decision was “an existential threat to the rule of law.”
Fellow liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor read a summary of her dissent from the bench in the courtroom.
“No right is safe in the new legal regime the court creates,” she wrote.
The policy remains blocked for now in one additional state, New Hampshire, as a result of a separate lawsuit that is not before the Supreme Court.
As a result, the proposal can can possibly forward nationwide, although individual plaintiffs could still file their own lawsuits in those states and the current challengers can still move to reinstate injunctions that are less broad in scope. Trump’s original executive order said the plan would go into effect after 30 days, but it was almost immediately blocked.
The decision does not address the legal merits of the plan, but only whether judges had the authority to put it on hold across the entire country. President Donald Trump and his MAGA allies have been harshly critical of judges who have blocked aspects of his agenda, although it is not a new phenomenon for courts to impose nationwide injunctions.
It has long been widely accepted, including by legal scholars on left and right, that the Constitution’s 14th Amendment confers automatic citizenship to almost anyone born in the United States.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States,” the amendment says. Based on historical practice, the only exception is people who are the children of diplomats.
Trump wants to adopt a completely new meaning of the language that would confer citizenship only on those who have at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or permanent resident.
Trump’s executive order, issued on his first day in office in January, was immediately challenged, and every court that has ruled on the proposal so far has blocked it. At issue at the Supreme Court were cases filed in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington state.
In court papers, former acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris said judges did not have the authority to issue nationwide injunctions and that the states that sued did not have legal standing.
The Trump plan has the backing of 21 other states.
The administration has complained bitterly as judges have issued nationwide injunctions in response to Trump’s bold and aggressive use of executive power to implement his contentious agenda, which has included ramping up deportations, downsizing federal agencies, targeting law firms and universities, and firing thousands of federal employees.
Justice Department officials say there have been dozens such rulings and have described them as being an unconstitutional attack on the president’s authority. Previous administrations, both Republican and Democratic, have also had their agenda’s threatened by nationwide injunctions, although they have become more commonplace in recent years.
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