Nationwide Injunctions, And Why They Aren’t Going Anywhere
Breaking Down the June 2025 SCOTUS Opinions with your Lawyer BFF: Part One
A couple weeks ago, the Supreme Court gave us a slew of decisions addressing hot topic issues: separation of powers, religious freedom, and the First Amendment. Predictably, there is already a lot of misinformation and slant on what these decisions actually say and don’t say . . . and if history proves correct, these false narratives will only get worse with time (R.I.P. to those irreparably lost to the fairytale that SCOTUS gave trump absolute immunity to do whatever he wants while in office). In a three-part series of short articles, we will break down what you need to know about three of the biggest decisions which came out, and what common misconceptions we predict will take over public understanding of these cases, along with the relative weaknesses in these decisions which can still be exploited: as a consolation to more liberal readers that mourn the outcomes, and a warning to those conservatives readers ready to celebrate. This first article will take on the infamous Nationwide Injunctions case.
This case considered the question of nationwide injunctions as applied to President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship.
When Trump took office in January, he issued an order to restrict birthright citizenship to only apply to kids who have a biological parent who is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident. The basic idea was that if you and your spouse illegally jump the border and pop out a baby, your baby should not be counted as a U.S. citizen because, per the Trump administration’s argument, that baby is subject to the jurisdiction of the country they are from not that of the United States. As you may recall from a basic civics class, the basis for birthright citizen comes from a constitutional provision (the “Citizenship Provision”) which guarantees citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the Untied States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”. There has been a lot of controversy around whether “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means that anyone attempting to invoke birthright citizenship must have been actually legally present under the jurisdiction of the United States when born there, but the simplest reason to interpret that in the affirmative is as follows: What the F*** else could the drafters have meant? If the drafters wanted birthright citizenship to just apply to anyone born here, full stop, they would simply have guaranteed citizenship to ‘all persons born or naturalized in the Untied states’ . . . period.
In any event, this case is not really about the contents of the executive order itself, but rather the issue of whether a random district court judge was able to issue a nationwide injunction to prevent the executive order from applying to everyone in the country.
In essence, an injunction is a rare court order that retrains someone from beginning or continuing an action which may threaten or invade the legal right of another, at least until a formal judicial hearing confirms that the action is allowable. Usually, a court only decides on a remedy and makes a judicial order after having a full hearing from both sides on an issue, and going through the typical legal process of filings, proceedings, etc. Accordingly, you typically only see injunctions in cases where one party will be irreparably harmed if not for rapid judicial intervention. For example: if a historic site was bought by a real estate mogul and scheduled for demolition the next day, the towns people would not have time to wait the several months for a lawsuit and trial to determine whether demolishing the historic site was illegal. If not for the ability of a judge to issue a same day injunction to halt that demolition until a trial occurs, the only remedy left for townspeople by the time the trial happened would be unsatisfactory: since you cannot un-demolish the demolished historic site, it would be forever lost and the real estate mogul would merely be able offer money damages in exchange.
Here, an individual complainant who would be stripped of his U.S. citizenship and subject to deportation per Trump’s order (in other words, a child of illegals born on U.S. soil) sought an injunction from a district court judge to prevent the stripping of citizenship and deportation until a court (SCOTUS) decided whether Trump’s interpretation of the Citizenship Provision is constitutional and the official Law of the Land. The District Judge did not only decide that an injunction was appropriate for the individual complainant (tenuously finding that the rare remedy was appropriate because removing citizenship and deportation seemed to be an irreversible harm), but also decided that he had the authority to extend that injunction to automatically apply beyond the parties in the lawsuit to literally every single child of illegals born on U.S. soil across the entire nation. The lack of legal basis for that truly cannot be understated: typically, the final judgment in lawsuits apply only to the parties in the lawsuit, and any ruling will become binding on future persons within that court’s jurisdiction that might try to bring a similar lawsuit for themselves in the future.
And that’s basically what the SCOTUS majority explains in their opinion . . .
Justice Barrett delivered the opinion of the Court in a 6-3 opinion (in the standard split of conservative and liberal appointees), saying “the United States has filed three emergency applications challenging the scope of a federal court’s authority to enjoin government officials from enforcing an executive order. Traditionally, courts issued injunctions prohibiting executive officials from enforcing a challenged law or policy only against the plaintiffs in a lawsuit”.
Translation: it has always been the case that if I sue you in federal court, or if I sue the federal government in federal court, and an injunction is placed, that injunction is placed for ME in MY case, not for everyone across the country who is ‘similarly situated’.
Barrett went on to say: “the injunctions before us today reflect a more recent development. District courts asserting the power to prohibit enforcement of a law or policy against anyone. These injunctions, known as universal injunctions, likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts . . . The bottom line? The universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our Nation’s history. Its absence from 18th- and 19th-century equity practice settles the question of judicial authority . . . that the absence continued into the 20th century renders any claim of historical pedigree still more implausible. . . .”
Translation: The scope of power held by the fed courts is defined by the U.S. Constitution or by Congress, but there is no bonus source of judicial power through which the Court gets to decide to give itself extra authority to do things—we need to find some basis in judicial history that universal injunctions are a thing.
Barret further explains: “Faced with this timeline, the principal dissent accuses us of ‘misunderstand[ing]’ the nature of equity’ as being ‘fr[ozen] in amber . . . at the time of the Judiciary Act.’ Not so. . . . ‘[E]quity is flexible.’ . . . its ‘flexibility is confined within the broad boundaries of traditional equitable relief’.’ A modern device need not have an exact historical match, but . . . it must have a founding-era antecedent.”
Translation: You can’t just randomly make up universal injunctions where there has never been a proper judicial authority or historical basis for them, and then start applying them without any sort of limitation.
Justice Barrett also is sure to issue a hilarious smackdown of the truly incoherent dissent of the worst SCOTUS Justice in history, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson: “the principal dissent focuses on conventional legal terrain like the judiciary act of 1789 in our cases on equity. Justice Jackson, however, chooses a starting line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor frankly to any doctrine whatsoever. Waving away attention to the limits on judicial power as mind-numbing technical query, she offers a vision of the judicial role that would make even the most ardent defender of judicial supremacy blush. In her telling, the fundamental role of courts is to ‘order everyone whole followed the law—full stop.’ . . . And, she warns, if courts lack the power to ‘require the Executive to adhere to a law universally’ . . . courts will leave a ‘gash in the basic tenants of our founding charter that could turn out to be a mortal wound.’”
Translation: Unlike the more coherent liberal justices who dissent, Justice Jackson does not base her opinion on any of those pesky foundational legal principles that the Supreme Court has rooted all their decisions in since inception—such as existing constitutional laws and acts. Instead, Justice Jackson says that if the hundred of judges across the country cannot all just make up on their own what the law is, and order everyone in the country to abide by their imagined laws, DeMoCraCy Is At StAkE.
In a fabulous ending, Barrett concludes: “We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: Justice Jackson decries an imperial executive while embracing an imperial judiciary.”
Translation: Justice Jackson, you’re embarrassing yourself . . .
Key Takeaways:
This case DOES NOT decide the issue of whether Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship is constitutional. The court addressed the discrete issue of whether a nationwide injunction could be issued by a district court judge in the mean time before the constitutionality of the order itself is decided.
This case DOES NOT mean that illegal aliens affected by Trump’s order have no ability to challenge the Executive Order and get their own injunction to halt the loss of citizenship and deportation: they just can’t free ride on the nationwide injunction of one (likely far left) district judge trying to prevent the executive order from applying to everyone in the country rather than just the parties in his case. Individuals that want to seek a similar injunction can either initiate their own case in their own district.
This case DOES NOT prevent similar injunctions from having a similar “nationwide effect” as long as the entire nationwide class of people seeking the injunction are named in the suit . . . That is what class action lawsuits are for. Class action lawsuits allow for a person to bring a lawsuit on behalf of themselves an a large class of similarly harmed people (who have to elect to join the lawsuit), and in theory actually allows for a sweeping multi-district class of people to be included as parties in the lawsuit and subject to the same remedies/injunctions the person bringing the suit. In theory, since SCOTUS did not specifically address this, it is still possible for illegal aliens to free ride on an injunction against deportation through one illegal alien’s class action lawsuit—this issue is by no means settled. In fact, we have already seen class actions of this kind happening, and they will continue to happen as the obvious workaround to this decision.
Stay tuned for Parts Two and Three, taking on religious freedom and the First Amendment!
In my own limited understanding of the fourteenth Amendment, it was, in part to insure that the children of freed slaves would automatically be US citizens. Originalists often refer to "original intent" to mean, "what motivated the Founding Fathers to do this or that?" At the risk of oversimplifying, could we not say, "What was the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment." Answer - to make slaves citizens. The intent was not to allow wealthy Russian or Chinese women, or lesser endowed women from Central America, to take a Miami Beach vacation, go to the beach, have a baby, and become an American citizen. I recall a Russian woman on a "birthright Vacation," saying something to the effect that $30,000 isn't much to pay for freedom."
Didn’t a District Judge just issue another universal injunction against Trump’s birthright citizenship order. Based on a class action made up of *checks notes* people who have not been born yet?
I could be mistaken, as I am going off memory of something reported recently.