Supreme Court Poised to Grapple With Nationwide Injunctions on Trump’s Orders

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Three judges blocked the president’s order limiting birthright citizenship.

One of the many lawsuits challenging President Donald Trump’s agenda will be attacked by the Supreme Court for the first time on May 15th for oral debate.

The incident arises from a challenge to Trump’s birthright executive order. The hearing is unusual in that it stems from a preliminary appeal that challenges the use of federal judges in a national injunction to block the president’s agenda.

The Trump administration argues that district court judges are beyond their authority by imposing a broad bloc on government policies rather than applying them to parties to the lawsuit. Three lower court judges have issued a nationwide injunction that hinders Trump’s policy of ending birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants.

More than 100 lawsuits against Trump’s policies have resulted in lower court judges issuing a nationwide injunction halting some of the administration’s agenda, from freezing federal spending to enforce immigration, to cancelling diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

The injunction is highly controversial as it imposed policy changes across the country, rather than providing relief to plaintiffs in the suit, and scrutiny from Supreme Court justice and members of Congress.

Trump says they are harmful to the future of the country.

“These judges want to take on the power of the presidency without winning 80 million votes. They want all the benefits without any risk,” the president wrote in a March post on the True Society.

“Stop the national injunction now before it’s too late. If Judge Roberts and the U.S. Supreme Court don’t immediately fix this toxicity and unprecedented situation, our country is in very serious trouble!”

Meanwhile, the hearing may also touch on questions about the constitutionality of Trump’s order regarding birthright citizenship. The order challenged the idea that birthright citizenship allows children of illegal immigrants to receive citizenship if born in the United States.

In January, Trump signed an order that would stop granting citizenship to individuals if a person’s mother illegally attended the country and that the individual’s father was not a US citizen or a legal permanent resident at the time of birth.

It also states that the privilege of US citizenship is legal but temporary, and does not apply to individuals whose father was not a citizen or a legal permanent resident at the time of the individual’s birth.

National injunction

The question of whether judges exceed their authority in the national bloc of policy has been raised previously in the Supreme Court.

Acting Attorney General Sarah Harris told the Supreme Court in March that the practice should be “sufficient” and that the block of Trump’s birthright citizenship order was unnecessarily wide.

“The parties will litigate heavy questions, but the courts will need to “limit the scope” of multiple preliminary injunctions “which aim to cover everyone in the country.”

Devin Watkins, a lawyer at the competitive Enterprise Institute, told the Epoch Times that the dispute in the High Court on Thursday “has nothing to do with the merits of the government’s position on citizenship.”

Rather, the key question of the appeal, he said, is whether the lower courts have the authority to issue blocks affecting those who are not parties to the case.

The administration’s position may receive sympathy from Justice Neil Gorsuch, Elena Kagan and Clarence Thomas. When discussing national injunctions, judges can ask about the source of judges’ authority under Article 3 of the Constitution and Federal Law.

In a 2020 agreement opinion, Gorsuch said there was a problem with “the increasingly common practices of courts that ordered relief that transcended their previous cases.”

The harm of weight

According to Harris, the bloc on Trump’s policies produced “irreparable harm.” This is one factor that courts will consider when deciding whether to issue an injunction. She said the court “irreparably hurts our democratic system when it bars government from doing so no matter where it is in the country.”

The long list of House Democrats submitted Amicus’s simple, claiming, among other things, that the government cannot show that blocking Trump’s policies would cause irreparable harm. Instead, they said Trump’s policies would create “disturbance.”

“The children lose access to health care and despite the end of the lawsuit, it turns out that they have been US citizens the whole time,” their brief reading.

Republicans argued that Section 3 of the Constitution introduced legislation that restricted relief to parties involved in the case and attempted to limit judges’ powers in this area. They pointed to the constitutional phrases of “cidents and controversy.”

“The Constitution limits judges to exercise power over a “cident” or “dispute.” The judges are not policymakers and allow them to assume this role is extremely dangerous,” Senate Attorney Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a March press release.

But Jacob Eisler, a law professor at Florida State University, told the Epoch Times that Trump’s policy has national implications. Therefore, the relief could not be limited to individual parties before the court.

Some of the plaintiffs suing Trump are pregnant immigrants, while others include the state government.

When issuing one of the injunctions before the High Court, US District Judge John Corneau said in February that the geographically limited injunction “has no effect” as plaintiffs’ states have to pay for illegal immigrant children traveling from other states.

“For example, babies born in other states would travel to the plaintiff’s state. Once they do, those people will need to be funded by the plaintiff’s state, unless there is a national relief.”

Constitutional Questions

The argument will focus on the judge’s ability to issue drastic injunctions, but David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University, told the Epoch Times that justice is likely to also consider the constitutionality of Trump’s birthrights policy.

“About this, this merit is pretty closely intertwined with relief,” Super said for those affected by the policy.

The hearing could be directed by a judicial person to return or dispatch a group of birthright citizenship cases to the lower court. In contrast to a typical Supreme Court case, they are expected to provide a preliminary legal conclusion rather than a complete ruling that Trump’s order is unconstitutional.

They could also comment on whether New Jersey and others challenging the administration would likely be successful in asserting Trump’s orders violate the constitution. In the oral discussion, the judge could ask about the text of the 14th Amendment and how it controlled birthright citizenship in previous cases.

Opponents of Trump’s orders on birthrights say, “We point to what is known as citizenship clauses, subject to the United States’ birth or naturalisation and jurisdiction. Both sides disagree about who is precisely protected by that language.

More than a century ago, the Supreme Court touched on the issue in a case called US v. Wong Kim Ark. The majority opinion in 1898 held that the 14th Amendment granted birthright citizenship to Chinese whose parents are legally present in the United States.

State and other entities suing the administration say the case shows that illegal immigrant children should receive citizenship. In his Amicus overview, a Congressional Democrat said, “The plain language of Article 14 grants citizenship to everyone born in the United States and subject to the law.”

But the administration and others, like Tennessee and some members of the Legislature, claim it is more limited.

House Attorney Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) joined the other members in an Amicus summary, which argued for reference to jurisdiction in the 14th Amendment, assuming that subjects had some loyalty to the United States.

“There is a widespread agreement,” the members said, and the amendment “means that children born in the United States will not receive citizenship under the amendment to Article 14.” They added, “The best reason is because they do not owe any perfect loyalty to the United States.”