Trump v. CASA, Inc.

Justice Thomas agreed that universal injunctions are unauthorized under the Judiciary Act because they lack a historical basis in traditional equity. He stressed that any authority for such relief would need a specific constitutional or statutory grant and suggested that a congressional attempt to authorize universal injunctions could itself raise serious constitutional questions.

He emphasized that the complete-relief principle is a ceiling, not a command to award the maximum possible remedy. Article III requires remedies tailored to the plaintiff’s particular injury, while equitable doctrine also requires attention to historical limits and fairness to defendants. Thus, a court may sometimes provide less than complete relief when traditional equitable principles so require.

Indivisible remedies may occasionally be proper, such as injunctions against a public nuisance when it is all but impossible to protect a plaintiff without incidentally benefiting others. But those cases are exceptional. Lower courts, he warned, must not recreate universal injunctions by treating administrative inconvenience or broad claims of harm as a basis for supposedly plaintiff-specific relief.

Justice Alito agreed with the Court’s disposition but identified two possible routes around its holding. First, he warned that States may seek broad injunctions by asserting the constitutional rights of their residents. Because third-party standing ordinarily requires a close relationship with the right holder and a genuine hindrance to the right holder’s ability to sue, he urged lower courts to enforce those requirements rigorously, particularly where a State asserts only collateral injury.

Second, he cautioned that universal injunctions could reappear through overly broad Rule 23 class certification. Class actions may sometimes properly support nationwide relief, but only after the rigorous analysis required by Rule 23. District courts should not treat the Court’s ruling as permission to certify broad classes without carefully applying numerosity, commonality, typicality, adequacy, and other procedural protections.

Justice Kavanaugh agreed that district courts may award nationwide or classwide preliminary relief only when a recognized legal mechanism authorizes it. He noted two such possible avenues: an injunction for a properly certified Rule 23(b)(2) class and, in an appropriate Administrative Procedure Act case, an order setting aside unlawful agency action. The decision, he explained, brings procedural discipline to preliminary challenges to major federal actions.

He focused on the separate problem of the interim legal status of significant federal statutes, regulations, and executive orders while merits litigation proceeds for years. In his view, national uniformity is often important because a patchwork of enforcement rules may be unworkable for nationwide programs, businesses, and people who move across state lines.

He maintained that the Supreme Court will often remain the ultimate decisionmaker on that interim national question. Whether lower courts issue plaintiff-specific rulings, classwide injunctions, or APA set-aside orders, losing parties can seek emergency relief in the courts of appeals and then in the Supreme Court. The Court’s responsibility to resolve consequential stay and injunction applications, he wrote, is a central part of its role rather than a distraction from it.

Justice Sotomayor argued that the Executive Order is plainly unconstitutional. The Fourteenth Amendment’s text, the common-law rule of birthright citizenship, the history of the Reconstruction Amendments, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, later Supreme Court decisions, 8 U.S.C. §1401, and longstanding Executive Branch practice all establish that children born in the United States are citizens except in narrow circumstances not implicated here. In her view, the Government avoided seeking a merits stay because it could not plausibly defend the Order’s legality.

She argued that the Government failed to show irreparable harm. The injunctions merely required the Executive to comply with a settled constitutional rule, and the Government has no legitimate interest in enforcing an unconstitutional policy. The majority, she maintained, improperly treated the Government as harmed whenever it is prevented from carrying out an executive policy, even one that violates the Constitution.

She rejected the majority’s historical account of equity. Equity traditionally sought complete justice through flexible remedies, including bills of peace and taxpayer suits that could settle disputes affecting broad groups and prevent a multiplicity of lawsuits. In her view, early federal decisions—including Lewis Publishing, Pierce, and Barnette—also show that broad injunctions protecting nonparties have historical roots.

Even under the majority’s complete-relief framework, she argued, these injunctions were justified. The organizational plaintiffs had members nationwide, and the States showed that a geographically limited injunction would not eliminate financial and administrative injuries caused by children moving across State lines. The Government’s proposed narrower alternatives were forfeited below and would create an unworkable two-tier citizenship and benefits system.

She warned that the decision leaves constitutional rights practically unenforceable for people unable to bring their own lawsuits. Although class actions remain available, certification is costly, time-consuming, and vulnerable to procedural challenges. The Court’s restriction on universal relief, she concluded, invites the Executive to enforce even plainly unlawful policies against everyone except the relatively few people able to secure individual judicial protection.

Justice Jackson agreed fully with Justice Sotomayor and argued that the decision threatens the rule of law itself. In a constitutional system, she wrote, courts must be able to require the Executive to comply with the Constitution. A judicial system that allows an Executive to continue conduct a court has found unlawful against anyone who has not sued creates an impermissible zone of executive lawlessness.

She rejected the majority’s view that courts function only to award complete relief to private parties. Courts also declare what the law requires and enforce constitutional constraints against the Government. In her view, the majority’s reliance on the historical limits of English Chancery overlooks the fundamentally different relationship between American courts and an Executive who is constitutionally subordinate to law rather than a monarch above ordinary judicial control.

The decision, she argued, creates two tracks: named plaintiffs receive protection, while those without lawyers, resources, information, or time to sue remain subject to an Executive policy already found likely unconstitutional. This burden will fall disproportionately on poor, unrepresented, and unpopular people, undermining the Constitution’s promise of equal legal protection.

Universal injunctions do not improperly give nonparties an unearned windfall, she reasoned. Constitutional rights preexist litigation and constrain the Executive from the outset. When a court universally bars unlawful executive conduct, it restores the protection that all persons were already owed; when it cannot do so, it permits the Executive to deny those protections at will.

Justice Jackson acknowledged policy objections to universal injunctions but considered them far less serious than requiring judges to tolerate known constitutional violations. She concluded that the Court had weakened the Judiciary’s core responsibility to enforce constitutional limits and had made future executive lawlessness more likely.