WASHINGTON, DC – Following today’s decision at the Supreme Court in Trump v. CASA, Trump v. Washington, and Trump v. New Jersey, three cases in which the Court considered whether to partially stay preliminary injunctions blocking the Trump Administration’s executive order purporting to limit birthright citizenship to children who have at least one parent who is a citizen or is lawfully admitted for permanent residence, Constitutional Accountability Center Senior Appellate Counsel Smita Ghosh issued the following reaction:

In today’s decision, the Court’s conservative majority limited courts’ ability to order the executive branch to completely—or “universally”—abandon unlawful policies. In doing so, it created a cumbersome requirement that courts must limit their relief to the parties who brought the case—here, the specific states and pregnant noncitizens that challenged the Administration’s unlawful executive order on birthright citizenship. This approach will make it more difficult and more time-consuming to challenge unconstitutional executive practices, limiting courts’ abilities to constrain unlawful presidential action at a time when many believe that they need it most. As Justice Sotomayor explained in a powerful dissent, this position “renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit.”

This decision will affect litigants across ideological lines, applying equally to challengers to gun control or immigration policies. But it is painfully ironic, and deeply concerning, that the Court issued this decision in the face of a policy that undercuts the deeply cherished constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship and is widely understood to be unconstitutional.

While the majority delved into the historic practices of courts of equity, it barely acknowledged the fact that its approach risks requiring noncitizen families to file individual lawsuits to protect their right to birthright citizenship—a right that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment put in the Constitution to eliminate “all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States.”

Importantly, though, the Court did acknowledge that states could possibly receive a universal injunction against the Administration’s birthright citizenship executive order, provided that it was necessary to give them “complete relief.” The states have argued that without a universal injunction, they would be unable to enforce federal benefits laws that require them to clearly determine the citizenship of young people in their states.

CAC Equal Justice Works Fellow Anna Jessurun added this reaction:

While the Court’s conservative majority did not address the merits, Justice Sotomayor’s powerful dissent is clear: the Trump Administration’s executive order purporting to limit birthright citizenship is “patently unconstitutional.”

Echoing CAC’s brief filed on behalf of an ideologically diverse group of leading scholars of constitutional law and immigration, Justice Sotomayor explained that the Fourteenth Amendment “means what it says”: “Children born in the United States and subject to its laws are United States citizens.”

The text and history of the Fourteenth Amendment underscore that all children born in the United States are citizens, with a few exceptions that, as Justice Sotomayor notes, are not relevant here. Indeed, as the principal dissent and CAC’s brief describe, the Fourteenth Amendment embodies a long tradition of birthright citizenship tracing back to the English common law, and since the founding, “all three branches of Government” have agreed on the Citizenship Clause’s sweeping scope and “have unflinchingly adhered to it.”

For the reasons Justice Sotomayor lays out, when the Court eventually decides the merits of this case, the Court should emphatically reject the Trump Administration’s “purported” efforts to “redefine American citizenship,” and the Court should uphold the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.