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The Supreme Court's conservative majority has stripped federal courts’ authority to issue nationwide injunctions that have blocked key parts of Donald Trump’s agenda.
The court’s anticipated ruling in a case attached to a question of whether the president can unilaterally redefine who gets to be a citizen states that nationwide injunctions “exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to the federal courts.”
A series of federal court rulings across the country struck down the president’s attempt to block citizenship from newborn Americans who are born to certain immigrant parents.
But the government argues those decisions should only impact the individual states — and the unborn children of pregnant mothers in them — who sued him and won.
Opponents have warned that such a decision would open a backdoor to begin stripping constitutional rights.
Allowing the president to unilaterally redefine who gets to be a U.S. citizen in states subject to Trump’s unilateral rewriting of the 14th Amendment would create a patchwork system of constitutional rights and citizenship benefits — including voting rights.
More than 150,000 newborns would be denied citizenship every year under Trump’s order, according to the plaintiffs.
In January, more than 20 states, immigrants’ advocacy groups and pregnant plaintiffs sued the administration to block the president’s executive order that attempts to redefine the Constitution to determine who is eligible for citizenship.
Three federal judges and appellate court panels have argued his order is unconstitutional and blocked the measure from taking effect nationwide while legal challenges continue. During oral arguments, the Supreme Court’s liberal justices appeared shocked at the president’s “unlawful” measure.
But the administration used the case not necessarily to argue over whether he can change the 14th Amendment but to target what has become a major obstacle to advancing Trump’s agenda: federal judges blocking aggressive executive actions.
The government asked the court to limit the authority of federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions, which have imperiled a bulk of the president’s agenda, which has thus far been dictated largely through an avalanche of executive orders, not legislation.
The government pushed the Supreme Court to reduce the federal judiciary’s power to issue nationwide injunctions, cutting off one of the few critical checks and balances against an administration that critics warn is mounting an ongoing assault against the rule of law.
More than half of the injunctions issued over the last 70 years were against the Trump administration, according to the Harvard Law Review, as Trump pushed the limits of his authority.
In Trump’s first term in office, his administration faced 64 injunctions, compared to 14 injunctions against Joe Biden and 12 against Barack Obama
The second administration faced 17 within its first two months.
In arguments to the Supreme Court, Trump’s personal attorney John Sauer, who was appointed by the president to serve as U.S. solicitor general, called the “cascade of universal injunctions” against the administration a “bipartisan problem” that exceeds judicial authority.
“The vision of the district courts that’s reflected in the issuance of these nationwide injunctions is a vision of them as a roving commission to correct every legal wrong that they can consider and to exercise general legal oversight over the executive branch,” he said.
Trump’s allies, however, have relied on nationwide injunctions to do the very same thing they commanded the Supreme Court to strike down. Critics have accused right-wing legal groups of “judge shopping” for ideologically like-minded venues where they can sue to strike down — through nationwide injunctions — policies with which they disagree.
After the government’s arguments fell flat in front of a mostly skeptical Supreme Court last month, Trump accused his political opponents of “playing the ref” through the courts to overturn his threat to the 14th Amendment.
“The Radical Left SleazeBags, which has no cards remaining in its illegal bag of tricks, is, in a very coordinated manner, PLAYING THE REF with regard to the United States Supreme Court,” Trump wrote.
“They lost the Election in a landslide, and with it, have totally lost their confidence and reason. They are stone cold CRAZY! I hope the Supreme Court doesn’t fall for the games they play,” he added.
In a separate post, written in all-caps, he claimed the nation’s high court is “BEING PLAYED BY THE RADICAL LEFT LOSERS” whose “ONLY HOPE IS THE INTIMIDATION OF THE COURT, ITSELF.”
The 14th Amendment plainly states that “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.”
But under the terms of Trump’s order, children can be denied citizenship if a mother is undocumented or is temporarily legally in the country on a visa, and if the father isn’t a citizen or a lawful permanent resident.
The president’s attempt to define a key component of the 14th Amendment is central to his administration’s sweeping anti-immigration agenda.
His administration has effectively ended entry for asylum seekers, declaring the United States under “invasion” from foreign gangs to summarily remove alleged members, and stripped legal protections for more than 1 million people — radically expanding the pool of “undocumented” people now vulnerable for arrest and removal.
The administration has also effectively “de-legalized” tens of thousands of immigrants, and thousands of people with pending immigration cases are being ordered to court each week only to have those cases dismissed, with federal agents waiting to arrest them on the other side of the courtroom doors.
The White House has also rolled back protections barring immigration arrests at sensitive locations like churches and bumped up the pace of immigration raids in the interior of the country.
To carry out the arrests, the administration has tapped resources from other state and local agencies while moving officers from federal agencies like the FBI and DEA to focus on immigration.
