In Birthright Citizenship Decision, the Supreme Court Expanded Trump’s Power

On the surface, the Supreme Court’s ruling in the birthright citizenship case Trump v. CASA was about the dry legal question of whether federal district courts can issue “universal” injunctions—orders constraining the government from acting against individuals beyond those who brought the lawsuit. But the impact of the Court’s decision is likely to be seismic, both because of the fundamental nature of the right involved in the underlying challenge and because of what the ruling portends for future challenges to unlawful executive action.

It is important to note at the outset that as of today, July 1, 2025, nothing has changed about birthright citizenship, notwithstanding Friday’s decision. That means that a child born in the United States today is a U.S. citizen, full stop. It does not matter what state they are born in or the immigration status of their parents; that child is fully protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship guarantee. But what happens after July 25 depends on several factors.

Trump v. CASA’s journey through the courts

Trump v. CASA  arose out of multiple challenges to Trump’s Day One Executive Order (EO) that sought to strip birthright citizenship to children whose mothers were undocumented or on temporary visas and whose fathers were not citizens or lawful permanent residents. The EO was set to take effect on February 19, 2025 and would have applied to children born after that date.

Membership-based organizations and multiple states immediately filed lawsuits in federal district courts across the country challenging the EO as unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S Constitution and as a violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Every court to consider the cases found that the EO likely violated the Constitution and enjoined its enforcement, preventing Trump from taking away birthright citizenship from anyone, even people who had not sued.

The Trump administration then sought a partial “stay” (pause) on those injunctions from federal courts of appeals and eventually, the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the administration’s request to stay those injunctions and consolidated three cases—two filed by states and one filed by CASA and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP) on behalf of individual pregnant women and members of those organizations impacted by the EO.

The Court’s review in the CASA case was limited to the issue of whether it was appropriate for the district court to issue “universal” injunctions or whether relief had to be confined to the plaintiffs in the lawsuits. In other words, the Court was not considering whether the EO violates the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or the INA in this June 2025 decision.

The case arose on the Court’s so-called “shadow” docket, meaning that it arrived at the Supreme Court at lightning speed based on only preliminary injunction briefing, without lower courts’ full consideration of the merits of the legal issues. The Court’s willingness to grant—or deny—reprieve from lower court rulings through the shadow docket has been the subject of controversy through multiple administrations and across issues ranging from immigration to COVID-19 restrictions to abortion rights.

The majority opinion in CASA,authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett and joined by the five other conservative justices, held that the government was likely to succeed in its argument that the district courts’ injunctions exceeded their authority under the Judiciary Act of 1789. The Court took a deep dive into the history of injunctions and the courts’ equitable power stemming from the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the founding of the United States, finding that “[b]ecause the universal injunction lacks a historical pedigree, it falls outside the bounds of a federal court’s equitable authority under the Judiciary Act.”

Having decided that universal injunctions were not legal, the Court then turned to the specifics of the birthright citizenship cases. For the individuals and associations challenging the EO, the Court held that they could obtain “complete relief” through an injunction that benefitted them and their members alone. Therefore, according to the Court, a broader injunction was not necessary.

The Court admitted that the issue was “more complicated” for the states who sued. In those cases, the states had argued that a blanket injunction against enforcement of the EO anywhere was needed, because of the reality that people continuously cross state borders and that a “patchwork injunction” would be unworkable and cause them substantial financial harms. On that issue, the Court punted to the lower courts to decide in the first instance “whether a narrower injunction is appropriate” in cases where the states sued.

The decision leaves many questions unanswered. The first is whether there is any way to still block the birthright EO on a national scale. Some possibilities remain, including: 1) any of the lower courts deciding that the states who challenged the EO cannot obtain “complete relief” without a nationwide injunction; and 2) any of the individual challengers successfully converting their lawsuits to class action lawsuits, which would cover any child born after February 19 who would be denied citizenship under the EO, and then getting a court to agree to enter an injunction that protects the whole “class.” Plaintiffs in the CASA case filed an amended complaint and a motion for class certification within hours of the Supreme Court decision, and other plaintiffs quickly did the same.

Even without any further relief, the government cannot apply the EO to deny any child their birthright citizenship for the next 30 days. It can, however, begin to develop and issue guidance about how the executive branch will implement the EO. The scope of any renewed injunctions and certified classes, in addition to the merits of the underlying legal issue—i.e., whether the EO violates the Constitution and INA—will certainly end up back at the Supreme Court.

Consequences beyond immigration

The CASA case will create new complications for plaintiffs seeking broad relief against government policies far beyond the immigration sphere. More civil rights plaintiffs will likely seek to proceed as class actions, but that route is labor intensive, and recent Supreme Court cases have tightened the standards for class certification. The government can also immediately seek to appeal a grant of class certification. It has already indicated in the CASA case that it will oppose the plaintiffs’ efforts to proceed as a class, underscoring that class actions are not a panacea.

In some cases, challengers can sue under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and seek to vacate certain executive actions. If they are successful, such rulings should apply across the board and not just to the plaintiffs, although there is no guarantee that this option will replace universal injunctions in all cases.

By restricting universal injunctions, the Supreme Court has made it more difficult to obtain broad relief against unlawful government actions, emboldening the executive to “give it a try,” even if the action is eventually stopped by a court. The amount of damage that could be done in the interim, especially around a fundamental constitutional right like citizenship, is extreme.

If no court issues a broader injunction in the next month, there is a real possibility that the EO could take effect in some states. That raises the risk of babies born in certain parts of the United States, for the first time since 1868, being fully stripped of their rights as U.S. citizens, perhaps even rendering them stateless. The human cost of such an action is unconscionable.

The CASA decision is another in a series of Supreme Court actions that closes—or at least impedes access to—the courthouse doors for less-resourced challengers. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted in her dissent, the decision “will disproportionately impact the poor, the uneducated, and the unpopular—i.e., those who may not have the wherewithal to lawyer up and will all too often find themselves beholden to the Executive’s whims.”