Big Win for Trump as US Supreme Court Curbs Judges’ Power to Block His Orders Nationwide

The US Supreme Court on Friday delivered a major procedural victory to President Donald Trump, ruling to significantly limit the power of individual federal judges to issue nationwide orders blocking his executive policies. The 6-3 decision came in a high-stakes case concerning Trump’s executive order aiming to end birthright citizenship, a move that will now be harder for opponents to challenge across the entire country.

While the ruling is a significant win for the Trump administration, which has long criticized “judicial overreach,” the court did not decide on the central question of whether the president’s attempt to revoke birthright citizenship is constitutional. The legal battle over that core issue will continue in lower courts, but without the powerful tool of a single judge being able to halt the policy everywhere.

Writing for the conservative majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated that sweeping nationwide injunctions, which have been frequently used to block Trump’s policies, “likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts.” She argued that the role of courts is to resolve specific legal disputes, not to exercise general oversight of the executive branch.

“When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too,” Barrett wrote, effectively dismantling a key legal strategy used by opponents of the administration. This means that for now, the injunctions blocking the birthright citizenship order are narrowed only to the specific parties and states that filed the lawsuits.

The decision sparked a fiery dissent from the court’s three liberal justices. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a rare move, read her dissent from the bench, accusing her conservative colleagues of “shamefully” allowing judicial “gamesmanship.” She fiercely defended birthright citizenship as a cornerstone of the US Constitution, enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment since 1868.

“There it has remained, accepted and respected by Congress, by the Executive, and by this Court. Until today,” Sotomayor wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

President Trump immediately celebrated the outcome, posting “GIANT WIN in the United States Supreme Court!” on social media. His allies hailed the decision as a necessary check on the power of lower court judges who they feel have unfairly targeted his agenda.

The ruling creates a complex legal landscape. While the birthright citizenship order remains blocked in the states that sued, it could theoretically be implemented in others, creating a patchwork of citizenship rules across the country. The fight now returns to the lower courts, where opponents must pursue more complex and time-consuming legal avenues, like class-action lawsuits, to challenge the policy on a broader scale.