Hours after being sworn in on January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump, sitting behind the Resolute Desk in a crowded Oval Office full of staff, reporters, and cameras, signed an executive order aimed at limiting the scope of birthright citizenship in clear defiance of the first sentence of the 14th Amendment.
“That’s a good one,” President Trump said as he began signing the order, “that’s a big one.” Seconds later, he went on to call birthright citizenship as a whole “absolutely ridiculous.” When a reporter asked whether courts were likely to block the order from taking effect, President Trump, with almost no expression showing on his face, responded, “You could be right…we’ll see.”
It did not take long for the reporter to get his answer.
Just three days later, a federal district judge in Washington issued a temporary restraining order preventing the Trump administration from enforcing its executive order. Soon after, the temporary restraining order was upgraded to a universal injunction, which is a powerful type of court order that blocks the enforcement of a policy against anyone, rather than just the plaintiffs in a lawsuit. Around the same time, another federal district judge also issued a universal injunction completely blocking the executive order from taking effect.
Universal injunctions like these have proven to be one of the judiciary’s most powerful tools for checking executive overreach over the past five presidential administrations, but especially during both of President Trump’s terms. In fact, in the first 100 days of President Trump’s second term, his administration faced 25 universal injunctions, just three shy of the 28 universal injunctions issued over the entirety of former President Joseph Biden’s four-year term.
Indeed, the tally of universal injunctions issued against President Trump is striking. In his first term, the Trump administration faced an astonishing 64 universal injunctions — far surpassing the totals issued during the eight-year presidencies of George W. Bush, who faced just six, and Barack Obama, who faced 12. As a result, the universal injunction has become almost synonymous with blocking the most unconstitutional of President Trump’s policies.
Because of this, it came as a shock to many when, on June 27th, just months into President Trump’s tumultuous second term, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority stripped the judiciary of this sweeping check on the Executive Branch.
While many progressives strongly rebuked the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. CASA, Inc., arguing that the majority had cleared the way for the Trump administration to go largely unchecked by the judiciary, Justice Amy Coney Barrett made it explicit in the majority opinion that, even if the Executive Branch acts unlawfully, “the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”
Justice Barrett’s assertion here — and in her entire 26-page opinion, for that matter — is spot on: federal courts were never expressly granted, neither in Article III of the Constitution nor the Judiciary Act of 1789, the authority to extend relief beyond the parties to a case. This makes any universal injunction, no matter how blatantly unconstitutional the executive order it enjoins may be, unlawful itself.
This in no way means that the Supreme Court’s ruling is not detrimental to the country. Undoubtedly, the Court’s decision to strike down universal injunctions will dangerously embolden President Trump’s agenda and have far-reaching ramifications on the freedoms and liberties of all Americans.
But, for better or for worse, that is not the Supreme Court’s responsibility. Simply put, the Court’s role is not to weigh policy outcomes. Instead, the Court exists to ensure that all actions — especially those made by the federal government, which includes the judiciary — are fully aligned with the Constitution.
Of course, there are debates about how to interpret the Constitution. Right now, the leading ideology for constitutional interpretation among conservative jurists is originalism, a philosophy which argues that the text of the Constitution should be interpreted as it was originally intended to be understood at the time it was written, rather than treated as a living document whose meaning can change over time. Critics often argue that this approach is too rigid for a changing society, preferring instead to employ pragmatic thinking when reading the Constitution.
Even so, originalist thinking is valuable because, unlike its pragmatic counterpart, it gives judges very little discretion to let their own political, moral, and religious beliefs play a role in their judicial decisionmaking. In other words, originalism safeguards against judicial improvisation, which enables judges to rewrite the meaning of the Constitution’s text. This is especially an issue because the Founders were quite clear about how the Constitution’s meaning should change: through amendments, not unelected federal judges. Therefore, by adhering to originalism, the judiciary respects both the Constitution’s text and the democratic process that gives it legitimacy.
So on June 27th, with this in mind, the majority closely examined the Constitution, federal statutes, precedent, and hundreds of years of legal history and tradition dating back to the 17th century, to reach the only decision that made sense legally: ending the universal injunction, once and for all.
Central to the majority’s reasoning was a line from the Judiciary Act of 1789 that provides federal courts with jurisdiction over “all suits…in equity.” This line, as Justice Barrett pointed out in the majority decision, was previously interpreted by the Supreme Court in 1999 to include remedies that were only “traditionally accorded by courts of equity” at the time of the nation’s founding. In other words, the Judiciary Act of 1789, and by extension the Constitution, only grants federal courts the authority to give equitable remedies, which are non-monetary court orders, such as injunctions, rooted in principles of fairness and justice for both sides of a case or controversy.
So then, the central question in Trump v. CASA, Inc. became whether or not the universal injunction was considered an equitable remedy at the time of the nation’s founding.
And, in looking at 17th- and 18th-century practices of the English Court of Chancery, which significantly influenced early federal courts, the majority determined that no “analogous form of relief” as expansive as the universal injunction existed during the Founding era. As a result, the Supreme Court had no choice but to rule that universal injunctions are not an equitable remedy granted to federal courts by the Constitution and the Judiciary Act of 1789, making them unconstitutional for judges to utilize, no matter the case.
In many ways, it seems ridiculous that such an important tool as the universal injunction is being stripped away from federal courts simply due to the practices of English courts hundreds of years ago. Indeed, it seems even more outrageous that the Supreme Court choose now of all times — as the nation braces for three and a half more years of a president who flaunts anti-democratic behavior and often shows a disregard for the Constitution — to severely debilitate the judiciary, which Alexander Hamilton argued is vital to ensuring that the other branches of government stay “within the limits…[of] their authority.”
Undoubtedly, by removing the ability for federal courts to immediately block unlawful policies nationwide, this ruling makes it far more difficult to block some of President Trump’s most sweeping executive actions — whether they involve immigration bans, abortion restrictions, or even voter suppression — before they take effect.
The fallout of this ruling was outlined most clearly in Justice Sotomayor’s dissent, in which she declared that, “No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates.” She went on to describe a hypothetical in which a future president bans certain faiths from gathering to worship or seizes firearms of law-abiding American citizens to point out that, as a result of the majority’s decision, the judiciary will no longer be able to swiftly strike down unconstitutional policies across the country.
Nevertheless, the Supreme Court made a decision that is fully in line with the original meaning of the Constitution. It is uncommon, in many ways, to see a Supreme Court decision like this one that is so legally solid yet politically devastating. It is a difficult ruling to reconcile in that way.
If anything is for certain, though, it is that courts must fully respect this divisive ruling. This is especially important in light of the potential loopholes in the decision that Justice Clarence Thomas warned of in his concurring opinion — mainly, the vague standards for who has standing to sue on behalf of others or how cases can be applied nationwide through class actions. It is because of these unresolved ambiguities that Justice Thomas ended his opinion by calling on lower courts to be “vigilant” against “potential abuses of these tools” by plaintiffs who may seek a de facto universal injunction through the use of these loopholes.
Justice Thomas’s message here is an important one for those who hold the belief that, regardless of this decision, the judiciary is too important right now to be restrained by a procedural specificity. Simply put, this line of reasoning is far too dangerous to indulge in. Today, perhaps it is the judiciary that is too important to be restrained. But tomorrow, what if it is the president? Or the FBI. Or the military. There will always be too slippery a slope when trying to justify neglecting the Constitution. Always.
Ultimately, do universal injunctions hold beneficial power to check President Trump’s unlawful behavior? Of course. But, even so, is the majority completely correct in calling on courts not to exceed their own power by granting universal injunctions? Of course. It is, once again, as Justice Barrett wrote in the majority opinion: “When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”
Indeed, the answer is not, nor should ever be, for the judiciary to exceed its own power. Because doing so would not only be unconstitutional — it would ruin the integrity of and trust in a branch built by, on, and for the rule of law.
Associate U.S. Editor
