In a Friday ruling, the United States Supreme Court limited the scope of nationwide injunctions by lower courts in a case involving President Donald Trump's executive order to eliminate birthright citizenship.
The court did not rule on the constitutionality of President Trump's executive order. But the ruling effectively allows President Trump to begin enforcing his executive order, pending legal challenges at the lower court level. The court ruled by a 6-3 majority, with the court's three liberal judges in the minority.
The case could have implications far beyond the birthright citizenship case.
President Trump celebrated the court's ruling and explained that the impact of the case would go far beyond birthright citizenship.
"Thanks to this decision, we can now properly file to proceed with these numerous policies and those that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis, including birthright citizenship, ending sanctuary city funding, suspending refugee resettlement, freezing unnecessary funding, stopping federal taxpayers from paying for transgender surgeries and numerous other priorities of the American people," he said.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted the impact of the ruling in her dissent.
"No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates," she wrote. "Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship. The majority holds that, absent cumbersome class-action litigation, courts cannot completely enjoin even such plainly unlawful policies unless doing so is necessary to afford the formal parties complete relief. That holding renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit."
President Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office that would no longer automatically grant citizenship at birth to children of immigrants in the U.S. without legal status.
One day later, 22 states signed onto lawsuits to stop the order from being enforced.
The Democratic-led states argue that birthright citizenship is a right for all people born in the U.S. under the 14th Amendment, which was enacted in 1868.
In the following weeks, several district court judges issued injunctions stopping the Trump administration from implementing the order. The Trump administration argued that federal district court judges should not be able to issue such wide injunctions.
Birthright citizenship grants U.S. citizenship to all children born in the U.S., regardless of their parents' immigration status.
With this ruling, a district court judge's decision would only be in effect for that district.
