The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Friday in the controversial “birthright citizenship” case that lower courts cannot simply issue nationwide injunctions, and that doing so is an abuse of their judicial power.
The decision in Trump v. Casa vindicated the Department of Justice (DOJ) strategy of arguing against the idea of nationwide injunctions, rather than addressing the underlying substantive issue in the case — namely, the dispute over whether the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees citizenship upon birth. Conservatives argue that “birthright citizenship” is abused by illegal migrants to make their children into U.S. citizens, who can later sponsor the legal immigration of the rest of their families. They also argue that no other nation has birthright citizenship, and that the Fourteenth Amendment did not intend to create it.
Given a number of contrary rulings in lower courts, which slapped nationwide injunctions on President Donald Trump’s executive orders on the subject, the DOJ kept the focus of its challenge to the narrow issue of nationwide injunctions. Democrats, and to a lesser extent Republicans, have sued in friendly jurisdictions in recent years as a way of stopping administration policies that they do not have legislative votes to overturn.
