Federal judge outwits Supreme Court on birthright citizenship—for now

Cue Jeff Goldblum in “Jurassic Park”: The lower courts … find a way.

U.S. Federal District Judge Joseph Laplante just did what the Supreme Court conservatives told him to do—and they’re likely furious. 

In Barbara v. Trump, one of the cases challenging President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, Laplante granted the plaintiffs’ request to provisionally certify a nationwide class and a preliminary injunction blocking the order from applying to everyone in that class. Voila! It’s a nationwide injunction, without being a nationwide injunction. 

The class is composed of all children in the country who would potentially be affected by Trump’s executive order, which was set to take effect on July 27. Now, babies born to undocumented parents on or after Feb. 20, 2025, will be protected from having their citizenship stripped away based on nothing but a racist, unconstitutional executive order. 

The Trump administration has continued to argue that it’s irreparably harmed by not being able to disregard the Fourteenth Amendment and immediately deport babies, but Laplante was having none of it. 

Laplante wrote in his order that he had “no difficulty concluding that the rapid adoption by executive order, without legislation and the attending national debate, of a new government policy of highly questionable constitutionality that would deny citizenship to many thousands of individuals previously granted citizenship under an indisputably longstanding policy, constitutes irreparable harm.”

This complicated maneuver is the only path forward for nationwide relief after last month’s birthright citizenship decision in Trump v. CASA, when the Supreme Court’s conservative majority did Trump’s bidding by barring lower courts from issuing nationwide injunctions in almost all occasions. 

In her majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett justified kneecapping the rest of the judiciary by saying that parties could just file class actions. But Barrett knows full well that federal courts have been making it harder to bring class actions for years. And she certainly was aware that the Trump administration is simply going to oppose class action certification, which is exactly what it did to the plaintiffs in CASA. 

When Laplante’s decision inevitably makes its way up to the Supreme Court, Trump knows he has a friend, as per usual, in Justice Samuel Alito, who used his concurrence in CASA to wag his finger at both the plaintiffs and the lower courts and let them know he’s not really interested in class action relief either.

“But district courts should not view today’s decision as an invitation to certify nationwide classes without scrupulous adherence to the rigors of Rule 23. Otherwise, the universal injunction will return from the grave under the guise of ‘nationwide class relief,’ and today’s decision will be of little more than minor academic interest,” he wrote.

Seriously, man. You already have the Supreme Court gig. You don’t need to toady this hard every time. We get it: You love Trump, you hate immigrants, and you’re going to twist the law into knots to help destroy the Fourteenth Amendment. 

But until Trump runs to the Supreme Court to make this go away, this class action stops his birthright citizenship order in its tracks. 

Getting nationwide relief this way is complicated, but it’s necessary. The plaintiffs are fighting the Trump administration, but lower court judges have also found themselves locked in a battle with a lawless Supreme Court, which essentially decided that lower courts are enemies who must be stopped from thwarting Trump. 

But the lower courts are the ones that are following the rule of law. Someone’s got to.