The United States Supreme Court has handed President Donald Trump a major victory over his Executive Order targeted at ending the right to birthright citizenship.
The Supreme Court, in a 6-3 vote, granted Trump’s request to narrow injunctions blocking his birthright citizenship order.
The justices ruled that judges can only grant relief to individuals or groups who brought a particular lawsuit and may not extend those decisions to protect other individuals without going through the process of converting a lawsuit into a class action.
“The universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our Nation’s history,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion.
Lower courts in the US had granted nationwide injunctions against Trump’s executive order seeking to deny American citizenship to children born in the US to foreigners on short term visas and those without legal status.
The judges said the order is patently unconstitutional because it conflicts with Supreme Court precedent and the text of the 14th Amendment.
The Supreme Court, however, did not rule Friday on the underlying constitutionality of Trump’s Executive Order.
The three liberal justices, in dissent, said the President’s directive is clearly illegal.
“The Court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissenting judgment.
