Judges go around Supreme Court to block Trump policy

The Supreme Court issued a landmark decision restricting federal judges from halting Trump administration policies nationwide. This led President Donald Trump to declare the era of universal injunctions over. However, just a month later, states, organizations and individuals challenging government actions are securing significant victories. Judges in multiple cases have made clear that broad relief remains available when they find executive overreach.

Supreme Court

In at least nine recent rulings, courts have explicitly considered the Supreme Court’s opinion and still granted nationwide relief — some even against the same policy at the heart of the high court’s case: Trump’s effort to restrict birthright citizenship. Other decisions have preserved deportation protections for up to 500,000 Haitians, stopped mass layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services and blocked the termination of a legal-aid program for mentally ill people in immigration proceedings. Litigants have used varied strategies to achieve these outcomes, including defending existing injunctions, filing class-action lawsuits and invoking the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which requires government agencies to act reasonably. “There are a number of highly significant court orders that are protecting people as we speak,” said Skye Perryman, president and chief executive of Democracy Forward, a liberal legal group active in cases against the Trump administration. “We’re continuing to get that relief.”

Court’s 6-3 ruling

Conservative lawyers also see nationwide injunctions as viable in certain cases. “We’re still going to ask for nationwide injunctions when that’s the only option to protect our clients,” said Dan Lennington of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision — which ruled that federal courts lack the authority to issue nationwide injunctions — was the product of years of bipartisan frustration over single district court judges blocking signature policies. The decision held that injunctions must be no broader than necessary to provide complete relief to the plaintiffs. “Many judges with policy disagreements continue to abuse their positions to prevent the president from acting by relying on other laws to provide universal relief,” said White House spokesperson Harrison Fields. “Regardless of these obstacles, the Trump Administration will continue to aggressively fight for the policies the American people elected him to implement.”

Trump’s policy

Trump’s birthright citizenship policy would deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. unless one parent is a citizen or permanent legal resident. Since the Supreme Court’s decision, judges have ruled that nationwide injunctions remain the proper remedy. U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston said such relief was necessary to protect 20 Democratic-led states and local governments from harm. He noted that families move across state lines and children are born outside their parents’ home states, warning that a “patchwork or bifurcated approach to citizenship would generate understandable confusion” among officials and fear among affected families. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reached a similar conclusion in a separate case, signaling that state attorneys general still have strong standing to seek broad injunctions. A New Hampshire judge, in a case led by the ACLU, blocked Trump’s order through a nationwide class action.

Judges block Trump

Judges have used nationwide injunctions in at least six cases in recent weeks to block Trump policies, often noting that the Supreme Court’s ruling does not bar such action. In one APA case, a judge ordered the restoration of gender-related healthcare data to government websites following an anti-transgender Trump order. “This case involves government officials acting first and thinking later,” wrote District Judge John Bates, who said nothing in the high court’s decision prevented reinstating the webpages.

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