The US Supreme Court on Friday finished handing down its opinions for the 2024–2025 term.
The U.S. Supreme Court released the final orders scheduled for the 2024–2025 term before the nine justices go on their summer break, including rulings on birthright citizenship and nationwide injunctions, Obamacare, online age verification, LGBT-related books in schools, and a federal internet subsidy program.
The justices will now go on their scheduled break and will take up cases again in the fall.
Nationwide Injunctions, Birthright Citizenship
On President Donald Trump’s January order that would deny citizenship to U.S.-born children of people who are in the country illegally, the Supreme Court’s 6–3 ruling authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not let the policy go into effect immediately and did not address whether the policy violated the Constitution. The order granted a Trump administration request to narrow the scope of several nationwide injunctions issued by federal judges earlier this year that halted enforcement of the measure.
“No one disputes that the Executive has a duty to follow the law,” Barrett wrote in the order. “But the Judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation—in fact, sometimes the law prohibits the Judiciary from doing so.”
The high court’s majority left open the possibility that the birthright citizenship changes could remain blocked nationwide.
In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the majority “ignores entirely whether the President’s executive order is constitutional” and only focuses on whether lower courts have the authority to hand down nationwide injunctions.
“Yet the order’s patent unlawfulness reveals the gravity of the majority’s error and underscores why equity supports universal injunctions as appropriate remedies in this kind of case,” she wrote in the dissent, jointed by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The high court decision, which opens an avenue for the Trump administration to take steps to implement its earlier order to end automatic birthright citizenship, was hailed by the president in a post on his Truth Social media network as a “GIANT WIN.”
“Even the Birthright Citizenship Hoax has been, indirectly, hit hard. It had to do with the babies of slaves (same year!), not the SCAMMING of our Immigration process,” Trump said in his Friday post, referring to arguments that were made by his administration regarding the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Reacting to the order on Friday, Attorney General Pam Bondi also wrote in a post on X that the Supreme Court “instructed district courts to STOP the endless barrage of nationwide injunctions against President Trump.” After the order, she said, her office “will continue to zealously defend [Trump’s] policies and his authority to implement them.”
