The U.S. Supreme Court, as seen on Oct. 9, 2024. (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court Friday in a major decision reined in nationwide injunctions by some lower courts that had blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order barring birthright citizenship.
The high court declined to decide the constitutionality of birthright citizenship itself, but said the executive order rewriting the constitutional right to birthright citizenship could go into effect within 30 days after Friday’s ruling in the states that did not initially sue.
The ruling likely could hamper other legal challenges against Trump administration actions in which nationwide injunctions are sought.
In a 6-3 ruling, the conservative justices found that nationwide “injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.”
“The Court grants the Government’s applications for a partial stay of the injunctions entered below, but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue,” according to the ruling written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
While the dispute before the court related to Trump’s executive order to rewrite the constitutional right to birthright citizenship, the Trump administration asked the high court to instead focus on the issue of preliminary injunctions granted by lower courts.
“The applications do not raise—and thus the Court does not address—the question whether the Executive Order violates the Citizenship Clause or Nationality Act,” according to the ruling, referring to the practice of granting citizenship to babies born on U.S. soil.
The order instructs lower courts to “move expeditiously to ensure that, with respect to each plaintiff, the injunctions comport with this rule and otherwise comply with principles of equity.”
More than two dozen nationwide injunctions
In the first 100 days of the second Trump administration, through April 29, judges issued about 25 nationwide injunctions, according to the Congressional Research Service.
“The lower courts should determine whether a narrower injunction is appropriate; we therefore leave it to them to consider these and any related arguments,” according to the ruling.
A narrower injunction could refer to a class action suit.
Barrett argued that a nationwide injunction would not grant more relief for barring the enforcement of Trump’s executive order against a pregnant person who is not a U.S. citizen and fears their child would be denied citizenship.
“Her child will not be denied citizenship. And extending the injunction to cover everyone similarly situated would not render her relief any more complete,” according to the ruling. “So the individual and associational respondents are wrong to characterize the universal injunction as simply an application of the complete-relief principle.”
Under birthright citizenship, all children born in the United States are considered citizens, regardless of their parents’ legal status.
If birthright citizenship were to be eliminated, more than 250,000 children born each year would not be granted U.S. citizenship, according to a recent study by the think tank the Migration Policy Institute.
It would effectively create a class of 2.7 million stateless people by 2045, according to the study.
In last month’s oral arguments, Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who argued on behalf of the Trump administration, contended that it’s unconstitutional for federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions. Instead, he said, the injunctions should be limited to those who brought the challenges.
Origins of birthright citizenship case
The case, Trump v. CASA, was consolidated from three cases.
One was brought by immigrant rights groups and several pregnant women in Maryland who are not U.S. citizens who filed their case in Maryland; the second came from four states — Washington, Arizona, Illinois, and Oregon — that filed a case in Washington state; and the third came from 18 Democratic state attorneys general who filed the challenge in Massachusetts.
Those 18 states are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin. The District of Columbia and the county and city of San Francisco also joined.
This is not the first time the Supreme Court has addressed the issue of birthright citizenship.
In 1898, the Supreme Court upheld the 14th Amendment, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, extending birthright citizenship.
In that 19th-century case, Ark was born in San Francisco, California, to parents who were citizens of the Republic of China, but had legal authority to be in the United States, such as a temporary visa. While Ark was born in California, his citizenship was not recognized when he went on a trip to China. Upon his return to California, he was denied reentry due to the Chinese Exclusion Act— a racist law designed to restrict and limit nearly all immigration of Chinese nationals.
When his case went all the way to the Supreme Court, the high court ruled that children born in the U.S. to parents who were not citizens automatically become citizens at birth.
The Trump administration has argued that the 1898 case was misinterpreted and point to a specific phrase: “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.
Government attorneys contend that the phrase in the 14th Amendment means that birthright citizenship does not apply to people in the U.S. without legal status or temporary legal status who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of their country of origin.
This is a developing report that will be updated.
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