US Supreme Court hands Donald Trump big win in birthright citizenship case

The highest court in the US found that district judges do not have the authority to impose nationwide bans on the president’s executive orders.

President Donald Trump and Pam Bondi, the US attorney-general, hailed the ruling as a 'giant win'. Picture: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images

The US Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a victory as it found that lower federal courts do not have the power to impose nationwide bans on his executive orders.

The justices issued a 6-3 ruling on Friday in a case built around Trump’s executive order on removing birthright citizenship, which would strip the children of undocumented and illegal migrants born in the US of automatic American citizenship.

The White House has argued that America’s 677 district judges do not have the authority to issue injunctions to stop Trump’s orders in decisions that affect the whole country.

Trump has signed more than 160 orders since returning to office in January, ranging from ordering the rounding up and deportation of undocumented migrants, to the powers of the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) and the status of transgender service members.

Many of the orders have been temporarily blocked by district courts, leading to accusations by senior officials in the administration that “activist judges” were standing in the way of what voters wanted.

At a White House press conference after the decision, Trump called the Supreme Court’s decision a “giant” warning that American democracy had been under threat before the ruling.

“[These] radical left judges overruled the rightful powers of the president …” he said. “It was a great threat to democracy.”

In the birthright citizenship case, six conservative judges backed the president, with the remaining three liberal justices offering a dissenting opinion.

Trump has argued that there should be higher standards for becoming an American citizen, which he called “a priceless and profound gift” in the executive order he signed on his first day. As part of his policy to remove those without the legal right to be in the US, he sought to remove birthright citizenship for any children they may have.

Protesters outside the US Supreme Court. Picture: Drew Angerer/AFP/Getty Images

The court left open the possibility that his policy might be unconstitutional – which is likely to be decided in the Supreme Court’s next session in October – even if the lower courts have overstepped their powers by stopping it.

The court’s decision is an interpretation of the 1789 Judiciary Act, in which Congress created lower federal courts. It found that Congress did not intend for the courts to impose blanket injunctions, but rather that they could only rule for or against the plaintiffs in any particular case before them.

“Some say that the universal injunction ‘give[s] the judiciary a powerful tool to check the executive branch’,” said Amy Coney Barrett, the judge who wrote the majority opinion.

“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.

“When a court concludes that the executive branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”

Leading members of the Trump administration lauded the decision as a significant victory.

Pam Bondi, the attorney-general, wrote in a post on social media: “Today, the Supreme Court instructed district courts to STOP the endless barrage of nationwide injunctions against President Trump.”

In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said: “GIANT WIN in the United States Supreme Court! Even the birthright citizenship hoax has been, indirectly, hit hard.

“It had to do with the babies of slaves (same year!), not the SCAMMING of our immigration process.”

More than 150,000 babies would be denied citizenship annually under Trump’s directive. Picture: Nathan Howard/Reuters/The Times

However, Sonia Sotomayor, one of the court’s liberal justices, said: “No right is safe in the new legal regime the court creates. 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.”

More than 150,000 babies would be denied citizenship annually under Trump’s directive, according to the plaintiffs who challenged it, including the Democratic attorneys-general of 22 states, as well as immigrant rights advocates and pregnant immigrants.

The case before the Supreme Court was unusual in that the administration used it to argue that federal judges lacked the authority to issue nationwide, or “universal”, injunctions, and asked the justices to rule that way and enforce the president’s directive even without weighing its legal merits.

The 14th Amendment to the US constitution has generally been accepted as the principle by which everyone – aside from a few defined exceptions, such as the children of visiting diplomats – is automatically an American citizen if they are born in the country.

In what was the last day of the court’s session, it also ruled that parents could remove their children from classes in which LGBT issues were being discussed. And in a separate case, the court upheld a law in Texas that requires pornographic websites to verify that users are at least 18 years old.

The Times