%
Supreme Court of the United States
No. 24A884*
Trump, President of the United States, et al. v. CASA, Inc., et al.
On application for partial stay
June 27, 2025

Plaintiffs (respondents here)—individuals, organizations, and States—filed three separate suits to enjoin the implementation and enforcement of President Trump’s Executive Order No. 14160. See Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, 90 Fed. Reg. 8449. The Executive Order identifies circumstances in which a person born in the United States is not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” and is thus not recognized as an American citizen. The plaintiffs allege that the Executive Order violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, §1, and §201 of the Nationality Act of 1940. In each case, the District Court entered a “universal injunction”—an injunction barring executive officials from applying the Executive Order to anyone, not just the plaintiffs. And in each case, the Court of Appeals denied the Government’s request to stay the sweeping relief. The Government argues that the District Courts lacked equitable authority to impose universal relief and has filed three nearly identical emergency applications seeking partial stays to limit the preliminary injunctions to the plaintiffs in each case. The applications do not raise—and thus the Court does not address—the question whether the Executive Order violates the Citizenship Clause or Nationality Act. Instead, the issue the Court decides is whether, under the Judiciary Act of 1789, federal courts have equitable authority to issue universal injunctions.

Held: Universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts. The Court grants the Government’s applications for a partial stay of the injunctions entered below, but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue. Pp. 4–26.

(a) The issue raised by these applications—whether Congress has granted federal courts authority to universally enjoin the enforcement of an executive order—plainly warrants this Court’s review. On multiple occasions, and across administrations, the Solicitor General has asked the Court to consider the propriety of this expansive remedy. As the number of universal injunctions has increased over the years, so too has the importance of the issue. Pp. 4–5. 

(b) The Government is likely to succeed on the merits of its claim that the District Courts lacked authority to issue universal injunctions. See Nken v. Holder, 556 U. S. 418, 434 (holding that for a stay application to be granted, the applicant must make a strong showing of likelihood of success on the merits). The issuance of a universal injunction can be justified only as an exercise of equitable authority, yet Congress has granted federal courts no such power. The Judiciary Act of 1789 endowed federal courts with jurisdiction over “all suits . . . in equity,” §11, 1 Stat. 78, and still today, this statute “is what authorizes the federal courts to issue equitable remedies,” S. Bray & E. Sherwin, Remedies 442. This Court has held that the statutory grant encompasses only those sorts of equitable remedies “traditionally accorded by courts of equity” at our country’s inception. Grupo Mexicano de Desarrollo, S. A. v. Alliance Bond Fund, Inc., 527 U. S. 308, 319.

Universal injunctions are not sufficiently “analogous” to any relief available in the court of equity in England at the time of the founding. Grupo Mexicano, 527 U. S., at 318–319. Equity offered a mechanism for the Crown “to secure justice where it would not be secured by the ordinary and existing processes of law.” G. Adams, The Origin of English Equity, 16 Colum. L. Rev. 87, 91. This “judicial prerogative of the King” thus extended to “those causes which the ordinary judges were incapable of determining.” 1 J. Pomeroy, Equity Jurisprudence §31, p. 27. Eventually, the Crown instituted the “practice of delegating the cases” that “came before” the judicial prerogative “to the chancellor for his sole decision.” Id., §34, at 28. The “general rule in Equity [was] that all persons materially interested [in the suit] [were] to be made parties to it.” J. Story, Commentaries on Equity Pleadings §72, p. 74 (Story). Injunctions were no exception; there were “sometimes suits to restrain the actions of particular officers against particular plaintiffs.” S. Bray, Multiple Chancellors: Reforming the National Injunction, 131 Harv. L. Rev. 417, 425 (Bray, Multiple Chancellors). Of importance here, suits in equity were brought by and against individual parties, and the Chancellor’s remedies were generally party specific. See Iveson v. Harris, 7 Ves. 251, 257, 32 Eng. Rep. 102, 104 (“[Y]ou cannot have an injunction except against a party to the suit”). In sum, under longstanding equity practice in England, there was no remedy “remotely like a national injunction.” Bray, Multiple Chancellors 425.

Nor did founding-era courts of equity in the United States chart a different course. If anything, the approach traditionally taken by federal courts cuts against the existence of such a sweeping remedy. Consider Scott v. Donald, where the plaintiff successfully challenged the constitutionality of a law on which state officials had relied to confiscate alcohol that the plaintiff kept for personal use. See 165 U. S. 107, 109 (statement of case); id., at 111–112 (opinion of the Court). Although the plaintiff sought an injunction barring enforcement of the law against both himself and anyone “whose rights [were] infringed and threatened” by it, the Court permitted only relief benefitting the named plaintiff. Id., at 115–117. In the ensuing decades, the Court consistently rebuffed requests for relief that extended beyond the parties. See, e.g., Perkins v. Lukens Steel Co., 310 U. S. 113, 123; Frothingham v. Mellon, decided with Massachusetts v. Mellon, 262 U. S. 447, 487–489.

The Court’s early refusals to grant relief to nonparties are consistent with the party-specific principles that permeate the Court’s understanding of equity. “[N]either declaratory nor injunctive relief,” the Court has said, “can directly interfere with enforcement of contested statutes or ordinances except with respect to the particular federal plaintiffs.” Doran v. Salem Inn, Inc., 422 U. S. 922, 931. In fact, universal injunctions were conspicuously nonexistent for most of the Nation’s history. Their absence from 18th and 19th century equity practice settles the question of judicial authority.

While “equity is flexible,” Grupo Mexicano, 527 U. S., at 322, the Court’s precedent emphasizes that its “flexibility is confined within the broad boundaries of traditional equitable relief.” Ibid. Because the universal injunction lacks a historical pedigree, it falls outside the bounds of a federal court’s equitable authority under the Judiciary Act. Pp. 5–11.

(c) Respondents’ counterarguments are unavailing. Pp. 11–21.

(1) In an effort to satisfy Grupo Mexicano’s historical test, respondents claim that universal injunctions are the modern equivalent of the decree resulting from a “bill of peace”—a form of group litigation in the Court of Chancery. Respondents contend that the existence of this historic equitable device means that federal courts have the equitable authority to issue universal injunctions under the Judiciary Act. The analogy, however, does not work. True, “bills of peace allowed [courts of equity] to adjudicate the rights of members of dispersed groups without formally joining them to a lawsuit through the usual procedures.” Arizona v. Biden, 40 F. 4th 375, 397 (Sutton, C. J., concurring). Unlike universal injunctions, however, which reach anyone affected by executive or legislative action, bills of peace involved a “group [that] was small and cohesive.” Bray, Multiple Chancellors 426. And unlike universal injunctions, which bind only the parties to the suit, decrees resulting from a bill of peace “would bind all members of the group, whether they were present in the action or not.” 7A C. Wright, A. Miller, & M. Kane, Federal Practice and Procedure §1751, at 10.

The bill of peace lives in modern form, but not as the universal injunction. It is instead analogous to the modern class action—which, in federal court, is governed by Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. See ibid. Rule 23 requires numerosity (such that joinder is impracticable), common questions of law or fact, typicality, and representative parties who adequately protect the interests of the class. Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 23(a). The requirements for a bill of peace were virtually identical. See 7A Wright, Federal Practice and Procedure §1751, at 10 and n. 4. By forging a shortcut to relief that benefits parties and nonparties alike, universal injunctions impermissibly circumvent Rule 23’s procedural protections. Pp. 12–15.

(2) Respondents contend that universal injunctions—or at least these universal injunctions—are simply an application of the principle that a court of equity may fashion a remedy that awards complete relief. But “complete relief” is not synonymous with “universal relief.” It is a narrower concept, long embraced in the equitable tradition, that allows courts to “administer complete relief between the parties.” Kinney-Coastal Oil Co. v. Kieffer, 277 U. S. 488, 507 (emphasis added). To be sure, party-specific injunctions sometimes “advantag[e] nonparties,” Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U. S 667, 717 (Thomas, J., concurring), but they do so only incidentally.

Here, prohibiting enforcement of the Executive Order against the child of an individual pregnant plaintiff will give that plaintiff complete relief: Her child will not be denied citizenship. And extending the injunction to cover everyone similarly situated would not render her relief any more complete. So the individual and associational respondents are wrong to characterize the universal injunction as simply an application of the complete-relief principle. The inquiry is more complicated for the state respondents, because the relevant injunction does not purport to directly benefit nonparties. Instead, the District Court for the District of Massachusetts decided that a universal injunction was necessary to provide the States themselves complete relief. As the States see it, their harms—financial injuries and the administrative burdens flowing from citizen-dependent benefits programs—cannot be remedied without a blanket ban on the enforcement of the Executive Order. Children often move across state lines or are born outside their parents’ State of residence. Given the cross-border flow, the States say, a “patchwork injunction” would prove unworkable for the provision of certain federally funded benefits. The Government retorts that even if the injunction is designed to benefit only the States, it is “more burdensome than necessary to redress” their asserted harms, see Califano v. Yamasaki, 442 U. S. 682, 702, and that narrower relief is appropriate. The Court declines to take up these arguments in the first instance. The lower courts should determine whether a narrower injunction is appropriate, so we leave it to them to consider these and any related arguments. Pp. 15–19.

(3) Respondents defend universal injunctions as a matter of policy; the Government advances policy arguments running the other way. As with most questions of law, the policy pros and cons are beside the point. Under the Court’s well-established precedent, see Grupo Mexicano, 527 U. S., at 319, because universal injunctions lack a founding-era forebear, federal courts lack authority to issue them. Pp. 19–21.

"Because computers lack a founding-era forebear, federal courts lack authority to [regulate] them." The law, like technology, must evolve with the times. Class actions might have been sufficient when travel was less accessible, when doors weren't being blown open and families ripped apart before it's even known whether or not the people inside a home have broken any laws, much less their citizenship status. The government here is arguing that their ability to traumatize families is being "irreperably harmed" by stopping the practice nationwide. First, file a class action suit. Maybe the class isn't certified, but you can get injunctive relief in that district. There are 94 federal districts in the United States. 13 circuit courts. That's a lot of lawsuits to put together for an emergency. These injunctions are specifically for emergencies. Have they been overused? Maybe. But you can at least wait until someone listens to what's going on and decides what to do before moving forward and ruining peoples' lives, which will likely be the result of this.

(d) To obtain interim relief, the Government must show that it is likely to suffer irreparable harm absent a stay. Nken, 556 U. S., at 434–435. When a federal court enters a universal injunction against the Government, it “improper[ly] intru[des]” on “a coordinate branch of the Government” and prevents the Government from enforcing its policies against nonparties. INS v. Legalization Assistance Project of Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, 510 U. S. 1301, 1306 (O’Connor, J., in chambers); see also Maryland v. King, 567 U. S. 1301, 1303 (Roberts, C. J., in chambers) (“‘[A]ny time a State is enjoined by a court from effectuating statutes enacted by representatives of its people, it suffers a form of irreparable injury’” (alteration in original)). The Court’s practice also demonstrates that an applicant need not show it will prevail on the underlying merits when it seeks a stay on a threshold issue. See, e.g., Gutierrez v. Saenz, 603 U. S. ___; OPM v. AFGE, 604 U. S. ___. The Government here is likely to suffer irreparable harm from the District Courts’ entry of injunctions that likely exceed the authority conferred by the Judiciary Act. And the balance of equities does not counsel against awarding the Government interim relief: A partial stay will cause no harm to respondents because they will remain protected by the preliminary injunctions to the extent necessary and appropriate to afford them complete relief. Pp. 24–26.

(e) When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too. The Government’s applications for partial stays of the preliminary injunctions are granted, but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue. P. 26.

Applications for partial stays granted.

Barrett, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Roberts, C. J., and Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh, JJ., joined. Thomas, J., filed a concurring opinion, in which Gorsuch, J., joined. Alito, J., filed a concurring opinion, in which Thomas, J., joined. Kavanaugh, J., filed a concurring opinion. Sotomayor, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Kagan and Jackson, JJ., joined. Jackson, J., filed a dissenting opinion.

Footnotes

Together with No. 24A885, Trump, President of the United States, et al. v. Washington et al., and No. 24A886, Trump, President of the United States, et al. v. New Jersey et al., also on applications for partial stays.

Articles

Stellar reporting by independent journalists on this case and its implications.