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, clears the way for the Trump administration to push forward with its efforts to unilaterally upend longstanding U.S. citizenship rules and other major policies.
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.
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
“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 repudiate birthright citizenship, while criticizing her conservative colleagues for “shamefully” permitting judicial “gamesmanship” by the Trump administration.
Birthright citizenship — the principle granting citizenship to anyone born in the U.S. — was “ratified in 1868 [in] the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, which enshrined birthright citizenship in the Constitution,” Sotomayor wrote in the dissent, where she was joined by fellow liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“There it has remained, accepted and respected by Congress, by the Executive, and by this Court. Until today,” wrote Sotomayor.
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