Supreme Court Limits Use of Nationwide Injunctions

The court’s decision appeared to upend the ability of single federal judges to freeze policies across the country, a powerful tool that has been used to block policies from Democratic and Republican administrations. The majority offered a different path to challenging Mr. Trump’s orders on a nationwide basis: class action lawsuits.

Mr. Trump praised the ruling, calling it “giant,” in a news conference at the White House. “Our country should be very proud of the Supreme Court today,” he said.

In a blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the majority’s decision “a travesty for the rule of law.”

The majority stressed that it was not addressing the merits of Trump’s attempt to end automatic citizenship for babies born on U.S. soil. Challenges to the citizenship order are pending in appeals courts, and the administration has told the Supreme Court that it would seek review before the justices should it lose. But there is no pending case on the merits of Mr. Trump’s executive order at the Supreme Court.

It is likely but hardly certain, then, that the court will decide the issue in the term that starts in October, as Attorney General Pam Bondi repeatedly promised in Mr. Trump’s news conference.

Here’s what else to know:

• The Supreme Court’s opinion will lead to a drastic reduction in the federal courts’ ability to check the White House on policies, including orders halting the firing of civil servants, the defunding of foreign aid and the relocation of transgender women in federal prisons to men’s housing.

• The case decided by the justices on Friday arose from an executive order signed by Mr. Trump on the first day of his second term to reinterpret the principle known as birthright citizenship, which has been part of the Constitution for more than 150 years.

• The ability of federal judges to pause rulings for the whole country, known as a nationwide injunction, is a controversial judicial tool. They have been used to block Democratic and Republican policies, and presidents who preceded Mr. Trump.

• In other rulings on Friday, the Court upheld the constitutionality of a task force that recommends which preventative care services health insurers must cover under the Affordable Care Act; rejected a challenge to a Texas law that seeks to limit minors’ access to online pornography; and ordered public schools in Maryland to allow parents with religious objections to withdraw their children from classes in which books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes are discussed.

That’s because the case lacked the “question presented” that must appear on the first page of petitions seeking Supreme Court review. When the justices agree to hear a case, they do so to resolve the question on the petition.

But in this case, the court did something quite unusual: It agreed to hear arguments on three emergency applications seeking partial stays of the injunctions. Such emergency applications do not typically include a “question presented” page, and the three at issue in the birthright citizenship cases did not.

Such applications, moreover, are all but uniformly handled by the justices based only on written filings, without oral argument. Not this time.

The case was unusual in another way. The justices scheduled arguments at a special session of the court, in May, about two weeks after the last day for argument noted on the court’s annual calendar.

Hearing arguments on days other than those on the court’s calendar is rare, though there have been scattered exceptions. The court added a day last year in April, for instance, to consider the case on presidential immunity.

Hearing arguments after April is especially uncommon. There were arguments in May 2020, as the coronavirus was raging and the justices questioned lawyers by phone. But even those arguments concluded on May 13.

Indeed, it has not been since 2010 that the court heard an argument so late in the term, which as a formal matter lasts from the first Monday in October until the day before the following one. That year, the justices scheduled a special session in September to hear a second argument in the Citizens United campaign finance case, acting fast because the law at issue required the court “to expedite to the greatest possible extent” any challenges.

Now, those judges’ rulings can only apply to the actual plaintiffs in the case.

Friday’s opinion could affect any case, on any issue, where a federal judge makes a ruling that extends beyond the party or parties that actually brought the lawsuit. It left open the possibility that judges could still block government actions nationwide, but only in situations where there was no narrower approach available that would protect the actual plaintiffs whom the court is seeking to benefit.

Friday’s ruling will lead to a drastic reduction in the federal courts’ ability to check the White House, according to Judith Resnik, a professor at Yale Law School. Nationwide injunctions give courts “the capacity to tell the key nationwide actor, the executive branch, to behave lawfully,” she said.

District-court judges have repeatedly used nationwide injunctions to block Trump administration policies, including to halt the firing of civil servants, the defunding of foreign aid and the relocation of transgender women in federal prisons to men’s housing. Some of those injunctions have been lifted by higher courts; many, including those detailed below, remain in place, at least for now.

While some scholars trace the origins of nationwide injunctions, also known as “universal” injunctions, back to the early 20th century, their widespread use as a check on presidential power is relatively new and has been wielded against presidents of both parties.

The Trump White House has argued that lower-court judges are relying on nationwide injunctions to interfere with the president’s agenda in ways that overstep the courts’ constitutional role; his critics say that the rise in nationwide injunctions is driven by what they perceive to be the administration’s willingness to flout the law in the pursuit of his policy goals.

As of mid-May there were more than two dozen nationwide injunctions in place blocking Mr. Trump’s policies, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service.

Still, the Supreme Court’s ruling doesn’t mean they will instantly evaporate. Experts say the next step is for individual courts to apply the new precedent in their own cases. In some instances, the Justice Department will likely challenge existing nationwide injunctions to see if they need to be pared back under the Supreme Court’s new precedent.

Impact on Existing Trump Policies

Here are some of the policies that the Trump administration has tried to bring into effect, only to be blocked by nationwide injunctions that remain in force, for now:

• A White House effort to require more stringent voter ID at the polls, including proof of citizenship, was blocked by judges in Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts, who found that it was likely to violate laws against disenfranchisement. The requirements were imposed by a Trump administration executive order in March. One of the judges also blocked a new requirement that would require all mail-in ballots to be received by Election Day in order to be counted. The plaintiffs in the two cases are 19 states, and the League of United Latin American Citizens along with two other organizations, raising the possibility that the administration’s proposed voting requirements could apply in some states but not others.

• The Trump administration’s attempt to freeze as much as $3 trillion in federal funding to the states so it could be reviewed for alignment with administration policies was blocked by judges in Washington and Rhode Island. The government has appealed both rulings. The plaintiffs in the two cases are 23 states and four nonprofits.

• Judges in New Hampshire, Maryland and Washington all blocked an effort by the Education Department that demanded that public schools either eliminate programs promoting diversity and equity, or risk losing their share of roughly $75 billion in federal funding. The plaintiffs in the cases include the N.A.A.C.P. and the American Federation of Teachers.

• Nearly $2 billion in congressionally appropriated foreign aid flowing through the State Department and U.S.A.I.D. was frozen by the Trump administration until a judge in Washington ordered the payments to continue. More than 2,000 payments for work already performed are still outstanding. The plaintiffs in the case include nonprofits that fight infectious diseases around the world. The judge’s existing order requires payments to a number of nonplaintiff organizations as well.

• More than 25,000 children who face deportation could have entered immigration proceedings without lawyers, had a judge in California not blocked the administration’s attempt to cut off a contract that pays for their legal representation. The government has appealed the injunction. The plaintiffs in the case are a group of nonprofits that serve immigrants and migrants.

Nationwide injunctions aren’t set in stone. Often, they are preliminary orders. The judge can change them or remove them completely later on in a lawsuit. They can also be stayed or overturned by higher courts, on appeal.

President Trump’s second term had already seen a number of cases where higher courts, including the Supreme Court, intervened to lift broad injunctions imposed on the administration by district-court judges. Among the policies that higher courts reinstated, at least temporarily, are the revocation of legal status for nearly 350,000 Venezuelans, Mr. Trump’s unilateral imposition of tariffs on China and the Department of Government Efficiency’s accessing records of the Social Security Administration.

What This Means for the Courts

Even without nationwide injunctions, plaintiffs have a second mechanism through which they can attempt to stop the federal government in its tracks — class-action lawsuits. The justices cited class-action lawsuits as an avenue plaintiffs can still use to obtain broad rulings blocking potentially unlawful executive actions.

In class actions, a small number of plaintiffs ask a judge to make a ruling that would apply not only to them, but to others — potentially thousands — facing similar circumstances.

Class actions have succeeded in winning some broad rulings against the Trump administration in the district courts. Judges have used class-action rulings to stop the administration from moving certain I.C.E. detainees out of their districts; from publicly releasing information about F.B.I. agents who investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol; and from deporting undocumented immigrants to countries they have no connection to without extensive due process. The last ruling was in place for a month before being paused by the Supreme Court.

But class actions have limitations.

Judges must “certify” the class, using special rules that assess the group’s number and similarity of its members to one another, a sometimes high bar.

And even if they do so, other members of the class do not automatically benefit in the same way that they would from a nationwide injunction, which immediately blocks a government policy. Instead, they may have to find a lawyer and go before the judge and claim their due as a member of the class to receive its benefit.

Zach Montague, Dana Goldstein and Seamus Hughes contributed reporting.

The order will not go into effect for 30 days, the justices said in their opinion, allowing its legality to be contested further. The justices also did not address the underlying constitutionality of the president’s order to curtail birthright citizenship, potentially leaving that issue for another day.

The court’s ruling also appeared to upend the ability of single federal judges to freeze policies across the country, a powerful tool that has been used frequently in recent years to block policies instituted by Democratic and Republican administrations.

Justices across the ideological spectrum had been critical of these so-called nationwide injunctions, arguing that they encouraged judge-shopping and improperly circumvented the political process by allowing one judge to halt a policy nationwide.

The surprise decision means that an executive order signed by Mr. Trump ending the practice of extending citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States would be set to take effect in 30 days in the 28 states that have not challenged the measure.

The details of how the policy would be implemented were not immediately clear.

The ability of a single federal judge in one part of the country to pause a policy nationwide has been a major stumbling block for Mr. Trump. These so-called nationwide injunctions are controversial judicial tools, and have prompted intense debate over their legality. They have been used to block Democratic and Republican policies.

Federal trial judges have consistently ruled against the Trump administration, stymieing efforts to withhold funds from schools with diversity programs, to relocate transgender women in federal prisons and to remove deportation protections from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants.

The case before the justices arose from an executive order signed by Mr. Trump on Jan. 20, the first day of his second term, that appeared to upend the principle known as birthright citizenship, which has been part of the Constitution for more than 150 years.

The announcement prompted immediate legal challenges from 22 Democratic-led states and immigrant advocacy organizations and pregnant women concerned that their children might not automatically be granted citizenship. Within days, a federal judge in Seattle, John C. Coughenour, temporarily blocked the executive order. In a standing-room-only proceeding, the judge interrupted a Justice Department lawyer to castigate him.

“I’ve been on the bench for four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is,” Judge Coughenour said, calling Mr. Trump’s order “blatantly unconstitutional.”

Federal judges in Maryland and Massachusetts also issued orders pausing the policy. All three judges extended their orders to the entire country, even to states that had not brought legal challenges.

On March 13, the Trump administration filed an emergency application asking the justices to weigh whether such nationwide injunctions were legal.

The Supreme Court has never issued a ruling that squarely addresses nationwide injunctions. But justices across the ideological spectrum have expressed skepticism over them.

In an unusual move, the justices announced that they would hear oral arguments on the emergency application, blocking the executive order from being implemented in the meantime. Emergency requests are generally decided without a hearing.

At a May 15 argument in the case, the Supreme Court wrangled over the Trump administration’s claims that the lower court judges had exceeded their power.

The justices had two main concerns. Several appeared skeptical that federal judges should be able to freeze executive actions for the entire country, rather than just for parties directly involved in the litigation — the core issue of the case.

But many of the justices also seemed troubled by the practical consequences of allowing the executive order to go into effect, even temporarily and only in some parts of the country. Some of the justices questioned how they might quickly weigh in on the legality of the executive order, which the administration had not asked them to review.

“How would you get the merits of this case to us promptly?” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch asked a lawyer for the attorney general’s office in New Jersey, one of 22 Democratic-led states that sued over the order.

The underlying question — the legality of birthright citizenship — is a core constitutional one. The practice of automatically granting citizenship to children born on American soil, even if their parents are not citizens, has long been considered a tenet of immigration law. The 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, declared 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.”

In 1898, the Supreme Court affirmed that right in a landmark case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark. For more than a century, courts have upheld that interpretation.

Despite the dry-sounding legal issue, the case involved something urgent: an executive order signed by President Trump on his first day back in office. In fewer than 800 words, and with a signature scrawled in thick Sharpie, the president declared an end to birthright citizenship, the principle that children born in the United States are citizens.

Birthright citizenship is rooted in English common law. It was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution in 1868 in the 14th Amendment, which reads: “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.”

In one of its most notorious cases, Dred Scott, the Supreme Court in 1857 denied citizenship to the descendants of slaves, helping prompt the Civil War. The 14th Amendment erased that finding and expanded citizenship to almost anyone born in the United States.

In 1898, the justices again considered birthright citizenship in the case of Wong Kim Ark. Mr. Wong was born in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the child of parents who were part of a wave of Chinese laborers who came to the United States in the mid-1800s. Officials argued that birthright citizenship did not apply to him because he and his parents were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States when he was born. The Supreme Court disagreed.

Since then, courts have maintained an expansive view of citizenship. The few legislative efforts launched over the years aimed at denying the status to children whose parents were not legal residents floundered.

Mr. Trump has long been critical of the guarantee of birthright citizenship, and raised the idea of ending it during his first presidential campaign in 2015.

Mr. Trump’s views have been considered on the legal fringe, largely pushed by scholars connected to the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank. One of them is John Eastman, a former law clerk of Justice Clarence Thomas and a legal architect of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. But the president’s interest has helped bring the idea to the center of the Republican Party.

Even though he did not move to end birthright citizenship during his first term, Mr. Trump made it a priority in his second term, despite certain legal challenges.

After he signed the executive order, a coalition of 22 Democratic-led states, immigrant advocacy groups and pregnant women concerned that their children might not automatically be granted citizenship sued to block the order. One federal judge in Seattle, John C. Coughenour, issued a nationwide block on Mr. Trump’s executive order, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.” Other federal judges in Maryland and Massachusetts issued similar pauses.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to weigh in. But it did not ask the justices to consider whether the executive order was lawful. Instead, the administration made what it called a “modest” request to allow the executive order to be implemented in states that had not challenged it.