A divided Supreme Court restricted the power of federal judges to issue nationwide orders, delivering a win to the Trump administration, which has found its efforts to remake government repeatedly blocked by the courts.
The 6-3 decision in Trump v. CASA came on the final day the Supreme Court issued opinions before its summer recess. Legal experts said the ruling would likely lead to a patchwork of lower court fights over federal agency decisions, including the Trump administration’s plans to roll back environmental and energy rules.
The injunctions “likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the conservative majority. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito also wrote separate concurrences.
President Donald Trump at a White House press conference hailed the Supreme Court decision as a victory allowing his administration to quickly move ahead on a wide range of issues, from birthright citizenship to “freezing unnecessary funding.”
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche added that injunctions have tied up a host of Trump administration moves, including the firing of executive branch employees and numerous cases tied to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
“Every one of those stays requires a tremendous amount of work and effort by the lawyers and parties involved,” said Blanche. “They should be doing the work that the president and this administration demands and has a right to demand, and not fighting these local judges who don’t make decisions based on the law.”
Federal judges in Rhode Island and the District of Columbia have thwarted efforts by the administration to roll back billions of dollars Congress appropriated for green energy and climate projects under the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law.
“The opinion appears to be a bar on all nationwide injunctions granted by lower federal courts,” said Joel Eisen, a law professor at the University of Richmond.
The Supreme Court’s ruling will have tremendous implications for those seeking to challenge energy system practices they believe are illegal, he said.
“Plaintiffs that are challenging something that the administration has done, that they believe is illegal, will have to go court by court across the nation,” Eisen said.
He added that one way to expand to make a ruling more universally applicable is for challengers to file class-action lawsuits.
That approach can be more challenging because courts have to certify that the case meets a certain set of criteria — for example, that the litigants have enough in common with each other to be treated as a single class before the court.
Already, some environmental groups have embraced that route ahead of the Supreme Court’s decision. Earlier this week, Appalachian Voices and other groups filed aclass-action suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to challenge EPA’s cancellation of $3 billion in climate justice block grant funding.
While the decision is a clear win for the Trump administration, “it could come back to haunt the conservatives,” said Robert Percival, director of the environmental law program at the University of Maryland.
“A future Democratic president will have more leeway to do things that are legally questionable,” he said.
Percival noted that the solicitor general under Biden, Elizabeth Prelogar, was “no fan” of nationwide injunctions, as lower courts had blocked a number of the Biden administration’s policies as well.
The decision still seems to leave some room for courts to issue nationwide orders, but only if the challengers in the case come from a wide enough geographic background, he said.
Barrett did not state that nationwide injunctions were unconstitutional, said Suzette Malveaux, a law professor at Washington and Lee University.
Instead, Barrett’s opinion concluded that they were an overreach based on the Judiciary Act of 1789 and were inconsistent with “historical equitable practice,” Malveaux said.
“Under our well-established precedent, the equitable relief available in the federal courts is that ‘traditionally accorded by courts of equity’ at the time of our founding,” Barrett said.
“Nothing like a universal injunction was available at the founding, or for that matter, for more than a century thereafter,” she continued. “Thus, under the Judiciary Act, federal courts lack authority to issue them.”
The challenge came to the high court as the Trump administration has sought to defend Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order blocking birthright citizenship for babies born to parents who are either in the country illegally or on a temporary basis.
Shortly after the Supreme Court’s ruling was released, CASA amended its complaint before the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, asking the court to grant emergency class certification and immediately block the president’s executive order from going into effect for anyone covered by suit.
Lower courts have repeatedly and decisively blocked the order as unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. The Justice Department then argued in three emergency applications to the Supreme Court’s emergency or “shadow docket” that individual judges were overstepping their authority by issuing orders that apply nationwide.
The ruling comes as Trump’s supporters in Congress have also taken aim at nationwide injunctions. The Republican-led House passed a bill in April that would limit nationwide orders. Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) hailed the Supreme Court decision as a “significant step forward.”
Grassley, who said he would continue to work on legislation to bar universal injunctions, added that he was “heartened to hear a supermajority of the Supreme Court echo what I’ve said repeatedly: Judges’ constitutional authority is limited to deciding cases and controversies.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor filed a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who wrote her own dissent.
They charged that Trump’s move violated the Constitution, but Barrett said the analysis was premature “because the birthright citizenship issue is not before us.”
Barrett sharply criticized Jackson, writing that the justice “offers a vision of the judicial role that would make even the most ardent defender of judicial supremacy blush.”
Justice Jackson, she added, “decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.”
But Sotomayor accused the administration — and the court — of playing games with the case, noting the administration had not asked the court to fully block the lower court orders because it would have to show that its move was likely constitutional, which she called “an impossible task in light of the Constitution’s text, history, this Court’s precedents, federal law, and Executive Branch practice.”
Instead, she wrote, the majority used the case “to resolve the question of universal injunctions and end the centuries-old practice once and for all.”
“In its rush to do so the Court disregards basic principles of equity as well as the long history of injunctive relief granted to nonparties,” Sotomayor continued.
Democratic attorneys general, who led a multistate coalition suing Trump over birthright citizenship less than 24 hours after he signed the order, blasted the decision to limit injunctions to parties involved in the lawsuit.
“This unprecedented decision doesn’t make Donald Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship lawful,” said Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. “It simply allows it to stand in states either unwilling or afraid to challenge it, inviting this president and future ones to ignore constitutional limits.”
Nessel added that the “idea that our rights now depend on where we live is unconscionable. The Constitution is not a regional document, and it should never be subject to the whims of any political party or administration.”
In a press conference, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin noted that the court had chosen “not to address the issue of universal injunctions for the duration of the time that they were granting them for Biden administration appointee orders, and chose on the first order that got up during the Trump administration to use this opportunity to issue this decision.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the states “remain hopeful that the courts will see that a patchwork of injunctions is unworkable, creating administrative chaos for California and others and harm to countless families across our country.”
Reporters Kylie Williams and Hannah Northey contributed.
