The Supreme Court partially allowed President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order on June 27 in a decision that said universal injunctions likely exceed courts’ authority.
The 6–3 decision didn’t offer a final ruling on the constitutionality of Trump’s attempt to limit birthright citizenship but instead focused on whether three nationwide injunctions blocking the policy could stand.
The majority of the court said that “universal 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,” it said.
More specifically, the court said that the Judiciary Act of 1789 had not granted courts such broad authority.
Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said that “when a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
Writing for the dissent, Sotomayor said the court had “abdicate[d] its vital role” in fighting for the survival of the nation’s democracy.
She said that Trump had made a mockery of the Constitution. “Rather than stand firm, the Court gives way,” she said.
Republicans have raised concerns that the practice of issuing nationwide relief, which has grown in recent years, exceeds the parameters that Article III of the Constitution sets up for courts’ authority.
That portion of the Constitution says the judicial branch has power over “cases” and “controversies.”
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has accused judges of exceeding that authority by granting relief to parties not before the court.
The majority noted, however, that they were not taking a position on whether Article III of the Constitution, which grants courts judicial authority, foreclosed the ability of judges to issue nationwide injunctions. Solicitor General D. John Sauer had attempted to use Article III as a basis for challenging the nationwide blocks on Trump’s birthright citizenship order.
Much of Barrett’s opinion focused on the history of the judiciary in England and the United States.
“The universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our Nation’s history,” Barrett said. “Its absence from 18th- and 19th-century equity practice settles the question of judicial authority.”
Trump’s executive order directed the government not to grant citizenship if a person’s mother was unlawfully present in the country and the individual’s father was not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of the person’s birth.
The policy also states that the privilege of U.S. citizenship does not apply to an individual whose mother’s presence was lawful but temporary and whose father was neither a citizen nor a lawful permanent resident at the time of that individual’s birth.
Critics say Trump’s policy flew in the face of the plain language of the 14th Amendment and a decision the Supreme Court issued in 1898 called United States v. Wong Kim Ark.
The issue stems from a provision of the 14th Amendment, which reads: “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.”