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Even as the Supreme Court delivered its earthquake ruling limiting anti-Trump judges’ ability to constrain the president with universal injunctions, the justices pointed to a way forward for President Trump’s opponents: class-action lawsuits.
Within hours of Friday’s ruling, the first class-action lawsuit had been filed by the ACLU and other immigrant rights advocates who rushed to try to stop Mr. Trump’s changes to birthright citizenship from taking effect.
The groups said they were shifting legal tactics in the wake of the high court’s 6-3 ruling, which said universal injunctions — in which a district judge in one corner of the country could bring a president’s policies to a halt based on the briefest of arguments — are likely illegal.
“The Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship, and no procedural ruling will stop us from fighting to uphold that promise,” said Tianna Mays, legal director for Democracy Defenders Fund, one of the groups that joined the American Civil Liberties Union in filing the challenge.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing the key opinion for the court’s Friday ruling, said judges were becoming too imperious in their rulings, delivering broad blockades on a president’s actions even though there was little legal backing for doing so.
“These injunctions — known as ‘universal injunctions’ — likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts,” Justice Barrett wrote.
Mr. Trump called the ruling a “monumental” win.
“This brings back the Constitution,” he said.
Injunctions are blocks to action issued by courts. Generally they are limited to the parties who sued, or were sued.
But in recent decades, federal judges have increasingly issued rulings that go beyond the parties in front of them. In the birthright citizenship cases, for example, the judges said their injunctions applied to every state and every child born to illegal immigrant or temporary migrant parents, even though the challenges were only brought by Democrat-led states or immigration groups.
Justice Barrett, in a ruling joined by the court’s other Republican appointees, said Congress never envisioned that when it created the lower courts and gave them jurisdiction to decide cases.
The high court’s three Democratic appointees vehemently dissented, fretting about unchecked power and an unshackled president.
“No right is safe in the new legal regime the court creates,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “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.”
The case exposed competing visions of the federal judiciary. To the court’s GOP appointees, judges are servants of the law, seeking to decide cases before them. The court’s Democratic appointees saw them more as legal warriors capable of thwarting the will of a president gone too far.
“The majority ignores the Judiciary’s foundational duty to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States,” wrote Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. “The majority’s ruling thus not only diverges from first principles, it is also profoundly dangerous, since it gives the Executive the go-ahead to sometimes wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate.”
Justice Barrett delivered a vicious rejoinder: “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.”
Besides, Justice Barrett said, there were other options for a president’s opponents who want broad rulings: chiefly the class-action lawsuit, which does have a long, legal pedigree and can deliver nationwide rulings that cover even people who weren’t initially parties to a lawsuit.
Anyone who’s ever received a class-action notice knows how it works — lawyers file on behalf of some plaintiffs but argue there are more where that came from, and they ask a judge to certify the class, which means everyone “similarly situated” can be covered by the eventual ruling.
But plaintiffs have to meet stricter requirements for proving broad relief is necessary. And class-actions also bind all members of the class to the outcome, which means that if the government wins the case, it prevails nationwide.
Under the universal injunction system, plaintiffs could sue in multiple courts and only needed to prevail in one, where a judge is willing to issue a universal injunction, to stop the president.
Injunctions can also be issued quickly, on the barest of briefings, Justice Barrett said. And they are then quickly appealed, and the appeals courts are then asked to rule in a matter of days or even hours.
Mr. Trump’s opponents said the president’s birthright citizenship changes were the type of case that cried out for a universal ruling.
Otherwise, they said, a child born to temporary migrant parents in one state could be recognized as a citizen while another child born just across the state line might not be.
“In the face of authoritarian attacks, we’re filing a class-action lawsuit to defend the fundamental rights of immigrant families across the country,” said Aarti Kohli, executive director of Asian Law Caucus.
The Congressional Research Service identified 25 nationwide injunctions issued against Trump administration actions over the first 100 days of this term.
The Trump Justice Department suggests the number was even higher, with at least 40 issued as of last month.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said 35 of those were issued by judges in just five of the country’s more than 90 judicial districts, which she said underscored the problems with universal injunctions.
Both parties have complained about them at times — and cheered them at other points.
Republicans cheered, for example, when a federal judge in southern Texas issued a universal injunction halted President Barack Obama’s attempt in 2014 to create an executive amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants by building off his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Then Democrats cheered as a judge in Washington state halted Mr. Trump’s first travel ban in 2017.
Republicans were back again, hailing court injunctions stopping President Joseph R. Biden’s immigration and environmental policies.
And now it’s been Democrats again begging courts to step in and stop Mr. Trump’s unprecedented use of executive authority to cut spending, reshape the federal bureaucracy, enforce immigration laws and rewrite the global order of trade policy.
While the justices largely ducked the legality of Mr. Trump’s birthright citizenship policy in their ruling, the issue will come back to them at some point.
At issue is whether Mr. Trump’s directive to federal agencies not to recognize automatic citizenship for children born to illegal immigrant or temporary visitor parents conflicts with federal law or the 14th Amendment.
That amendment says citizenship is recognized for “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Mr. Trump argues that illegal immigrants and temporary visitors aren’t “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. so they can be excluded.
Lower courts have delivered a tsunami of rulings against Mr. Trump on the issue, issuing broad blockades that went well beyond the parties in those cases.
The Supreme Court sent the cases back to the lower courts to narrow their injunctions — and ordering Mr. Trump to wait at least 30 days before trying to enforce his policy.
The judges in the cases have set speedy briefing schedules to figure out how to proceed.
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