Trump, President of U.S., et al. v. Casa, Inc., et
al.
Trump, President of U.S., et al. v. Washington, et
al.
Trump, President of U.S., et al. v. New Jersey, et al.
In a notable procedural move, the Supreme Court has scheduled oral argument for May 15, 2025, to consider three related emergency applications stemming from President Trump's January 20 executive order restricting birthright citizenship. The Court's decision to set oral argument—rather than to summarily rule on the emergency filings—signals the significance of the underlying legal questions.
The executive order limits the ability of children born in the United States to non-citizen parents to acquire U.S. citizenship at birth. In response, multiple federal trial courts issued preliminary injunctions blocking the order's enforcement. The administration subsequently filed emergency applications with the Supreme Court, seeking to narrow or stay the scope of those injunctions.
At the heart of the case lies a critical legal issue: the authority of a federal district court to issue nationwide injunctions. Specifically, the Court is expected to consider whether a district court's injunctive power should extend beyond the geographic boundaries of its jurisdiction or whether such relief must be confined to the parties or interests within the district. Interestingly, nationwide injunctions were not a thing until the Twentieth Century. Justice Clarence Thomas has written that nationwide injunctions "emerg[ed] for the first time in the 1960s and dramatically increas[ed] in popularity only very recently."Trump v. Hawaii, 138 S. Ct. 2392 (2018) (Thomas, J., concurring). And although remaining exceedingly rare in the few decades that followed, nationwide injunctions slowly crept up to an average rate of 1.5 per year against the Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations. That trend has only continued to rise in more recent years, with federal courts issuing 20 nationwide injunctions against the Obama administration, and approximately the same amounts against the first Trump administration and the Biden administration.
The outcome of this case could have broad implications, not only for the fate of the executive order itself but also for the increasingly debated practice of nationwide injunctions—particularly in high-stakes cases involving immigration, administrative law, and executive power.
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