The Supreme Court on Friday limited federal judges from issuing universal injunctions, which had been used to block President Donald Trump from implementing his executive order ending birthright citizenship.
The 6-3 decision, which divided the conservative-majority court along ideological lines, helps clear the way for the Trump administration to push forward with its efforts to unilaterally upend long-standing U.S. citizenship rules and other major policies.
The ruling also bolsters Trump’s frequent claims that his expansive use of his executive powers has been unfairly thwarted by judicial overreach.
“GIANT WIN in the United States Supreme Court!,” Trump wrote on social media after the opinion was released.
The case centered on nationwide injunctions that federal district court judges had granted in three separate lawsuits challenging Trump’s citizenship order.
Those injunctions temporarily blocked enforcement of the order while the cases moved through the court system.
But on Friday, the Supreme Court ruled that, “Universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.”
The majority granted the Trump administration’s request to pause those injunctions, “but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue.”
Crucially, the court declined to rule on whether the executive order, which would end centuries of birthright citizenship in the United States, was constitutional.
“Some say that the universal injunction ‘give[s] the Judiciary a powerful tool to check the Executive Branch,'” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, one of three Trump appointees on the bench, wrote for the majority.
“But federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them,” wrote Barrett.
“When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too,” she wrote.
In a blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor decried the government’s efforts to end birthright citizenship, while criticizing her conservative colleagues for “shamefully” permitting judicial “gamesmanship” by the Trump administration.
“No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” wrote Sotomayor in the dissent, where she was joined by fellow liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
People hold a sign as they participate in a protest outside the U.S. Supreme Court over President Donald Trump’s move to end birthright citizenship as the court hears arguments over the order in Washington, May 15, 2025.
Drew Angerer | Afp | Getty Images
“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,” Sotomayor wrote.
The “patent unlawfulness” of Trump’s executive order “reveals the gravity of the majority’s error and underscores why equity supports universal injunctions as appropriate remedies in this kind of case,” she wrote.
“As every conceivable source of law confirms, birthright citizenship is the law of the land.”
In a separate, equally vehement dissent, Jackson added, “The Court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law.”
The bid to quash universal injunctions is essentially “a request for this Court’s permission to engage in unlawful behavior,” Jackson, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden, wrote.
“With its ruling today, the majority largely grants the Government’s wish,” she wrote. “But, in my view, if this country is going to persist as a Nation of laws and not men, the Judiciary has no choice but to deny it.”
