Universal Injunctions No More—How the Federal Judiciary Has Been Fundamentally Changed

At the end of June, the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts do not have authority to issue nationwide injunctions to halt federal laws and orders. The case at issue, Trump v. Casa, was a combination of multiple suits where individual plaintiffs sought injunctive relief against the President Donald Trump’s executive orders.

In a 6-3 opinion by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Court held that the immense power of issuing universal injunctions across the nation “likely exceed[s] the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.” While this ruling is not an iron-clad ban on the judicial power, the decision substantially curtails the ability of federal courts to issue these injunctions for the foreseeable future.

This decision comes after multiple constitutionality challenges were made to Executive Order 14160—the order that prohibits federal employees from granting or recognizing U.S. citizenship documents for persons born in the United States to parents without legal status in the country. Various U.S. district courts issued universal injunctions to block the implementation and enforcement of the executive order, and multiple appellate Circuit Courts upheld the injunctions.

Universal injunctions are a specific type of sought legal relief. When plaintiffs file lawsuits, they must state what type of relief they are seeking—monetary relief (damages), a declaratory judgment (clarification of legal rights), or injunctive relief (order to freeze an action). Usually, injunctive relief is granted to or against only one of the individual parties in the litigation, but when the government is a defendant, the “universal” nature of the injunctive relief can come into play.

Nationwide injunctions go far beyond providing injunctive relief to the parties in the case before them, freezing legal efforts nationally. Whether preliminary (temporary) injunctions, or permanent ones, both can take years to litigate, effectively halting the efforts of the executive branch. They have been a tool utilized by both conservative and liberal judges throughout the past several decades, however so sparingly that this was never really an issue worth debating—at least not until this year.

The outcome of one lawsuit applying to the entire country isn’t controversial. This is how declaratory judgments from courts function particularly from the Supreme Court. Further, the judicial branch checking the actions of the executive is a concrete manifestation of the separation of powers embedded in the federal constitution. Courts striking the actions of a president is also a non-issue (at least conceptually and in a non-political bubble). In fact, such strong balances of power are one of America’s greatest political strengths.

The issue with universal injunctive relief is that it is a de facto shortcut to a desired legal and/or political outcome. Because an injunction is a quickly issued pause on legal actions until the claim is more formally litigated, both plaintiffs and the courts can utilize this relief as a political weapon. As we’ve seen repeatedly over the last few months, where the nationwide injunctive relief power exists, any individual in the United States can single-handedly and immediately block the actions of a U.S. president via the approval of a single, sympathetic U.S. district court judge.

So why would the Supreme Court want to strip the judiciary of its powers? As it turns out, federal courts never had the authority to issue nationwide injunctions in the first place. There is no lawful basis for them in any federal statutory law or Supreme Court precedent. Instead, this practice of the courts developed slowly in a gray area of American law throughout our nation’s history.

The use of universal injunctions, while used sparingly, has drastically ramped up in frequency throughout the past few decades, specifically during the Trump administration. More than 50% of the nationwide injunctions issued since 1963 (64 of 127) were imposed against the first Trump administration, and more than 92% of the judges who entered them were appointed by Democratic presidents. Between Jan. 20 and March 27, 2025, 17 nationwide injunctions were issued. Their rapidly increasing use is what made them global news. And so, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to address it.

It’s important to understand that in Trump v. Casa, the merits of the case—the constitutionality of the executive order and its birthright citizenship challenge—were not touched. Instead, the Supreme Court only took the opportunity to clarify the authority of the federal courts, given their responses to plaintiffs’ relief requests. Therefore, we could see birthright citizenship—a right the Supreme Court has previously protected under the Fourteenth Amendment—back in the Supreme Court. While it is unlikely the High Court would even take up a case challenging such a well-established right, if they did, at least that decision would be reached on the merits—not via an antiquated universal injunction.