The US supreme court has supported Donald Trump’s attempt to limit lower-court orders that have so far blocked his administration’s ban on birthright citizenship, in a ruling that could strips federal judges of a power they’ve used to obstruct many of Trump’s orders nationwide.
The decision represents a fundamental shift in how US federal courts can constrain presidential power. Previously, any of the country’s more than 1,000 judges in its 94 district courts – the lowest level of federal court, which handles trials and initial rulings – could issue nationwide injunctions that immediately halt government policies across all 50 states.
Under the supreme court ruling, however, those court orders only apply to the specific plaintiffs – for example, groups of states or non-profit organizations – that brought the case.
The court’s opinion on the constitutionality of whether some American-born children can be deprived of citizenship remains undecided and the fate of the US president’s order to overturn birthright citizenship rights was left unclear, despite Trump claiming a “giant win”.
To stymie the impact of the ruling, immigration aid groups have rushed to recalibrate their legal strategy to block Trump’s policy ending birthright citizenship.
Immigrant advocacy groups including Casa and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (Asap) – who filed one of several original lawsuits challenging the president’s executive order – are asking a federal judge in Maryland for an emergency block on Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order. They have also refiled their broader lawsuit challenging the policy as a class-action case, seeking to protections for every pregnant person or child born to families without permanent legal status, no matter where they live.
“We’re confident this will prevent this administration from attempting to selectively enforce their heinous executive order,” said George Escobar, chief of programs and services at CASA. “These are scary times, but we are not powerless, and we have shown in the past, and we continue to show that when we fight, we win.”
The decision on Friday morning decided by six votes to three by the nine-member bench of the highest court in the land, sided with the Trump administration in a historic case that tested presidential power and judicial oversight.
The conservative majority wrote that “universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts”, granting “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”.
The ruling, written by the conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett, did not let Trump’s policy seeking a ban on birthright citizenship go into effect immediately and did not address the policy’s legality. The fate of the policy remains imprecise.
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