The White House believes that the Supreme Court’s decision on nationwide injunctions doesn’t just hamper opposition to President Donald Trump’s executive orders — it could also break the levies currently holding them back.
The Supreme Court’s decision Friday upends the No. 1 legal resistance strategy against the White House: scoring temporary universal injunctions from trial judges across the country to stop administration policy. During a White House press conference immediately after its release, Trump made clear he’ll try to demolish the many orders that have held back some of his most controversial policies.
“Thanks to this decision, we can now properly file to proceed with these numerous policies and those that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis, including birthright citizenship, ending sanctuary city funding, suspending refugee resettlement, freezing unnecessary funding, stopping federal taxpayers from paying for transgender surgeries and numerous other priorities of the American people,” he said.
Potential targets could include a D.C. judge’s decision in February stopping Trump officials from freezing all federal financial assistance to nonprofits, which is currently on appeal; a New York judge’s decision in May limiting what kinds of DOGE employees can access sensitive Treasury Department data; and a Washington state federal judge’s March decision, which is now on hold, to stop Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military.
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It would be up to the Department of Justice to stab at these and many other preliminary injunctions, while pointing to Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s opinion that such orders create what she called “an imperial judiciary.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi invoked those same words at a White House podium as she stood by the president Friday, going even further to denigrate the dozens of judges — including some previously appointed by Trump — who’ve stepped in his way.
“These injunctions have allowed district court judges to be emperors. They vetoed all of President Trump’s power, and they cannot do that,” Bondi declared.
Lawyers and elected officials leading the legal opposition to White House policies aren’t exactly throwing in the towel. On a call with reporters Friday afternoon, several Democratic state attorneys general asserted that existing injunctions could still hold up, particularly given the way states sued on behalf of their residents.
“There might be an attempt to expand this retroactively, but given the way that we’ve proceeded correctly, I don’t really anticipate that being a significant issue,” Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said.
New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin said that the band of nearly two-dozen states led by Democratic officials “will certainly assess any impact.”
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong went further, noting that the Supreme Court’s decision last year to overturn abortion rights handed significant power to states that could be used to continue challenging Trump’s policies.
“There’s no decision, frankly, that I abhor more than Dobbs. But that stands for the proposition that we, our states, are sovereign, and that we can act within our sovereign authority in the best interest of people in our states. Our colleagues call it states’ rights. Whatever it’s called, it confirmed the right of states to act on behalf of people in our states and protect our way of life,” Tong said.
On a separate call with journalists, the activist group Democracy Forward stressed that litigators still have the tools they need to erect barriers to Trump’s policies. CEO Skye L. Perryman didn’t initially think the “narrowness of this court’s ruling” allowed for the Trump administration to suddenly target existing injunctions, but she said the administration’s reading of the decision showed that her side needs to gear up for the fight.
“We don’t really see a basis for anyone to be using the Supreme Court’s decision today to disturb those protections in place, but we’ll obviously be monitoring it based on the statements, ill-informed statements, that were made earlier today at the White House presser,” she said.
Perryman also pointed out that Friday’s decision included a footnote that keeps intact the Administrative Procedure Act, which still gives judges the ability to rein in federal policy by “authorizing courts to ‘hold unlawful and set aside agency action.’”
In her decision, Barrett took aim at universal injunctions by stressing they “remained rare until the turn of the 21st century, when their use gradually accelerated.”
“Nothing like a universal injunction was available at the founding, or for that matter, for more than a century thereafter. Thus, under the Judiciary Act, federal courts lack authority to issue them,” she wrote, later adding that “federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the executive branch.”
Justice Clarence Thomas, in a concurring opinion, raised the specter that the Supreme Court is ready to step in again if it thinks trial judges are exceeding their power.
Justice Samuel Alito is already expecting these Trump-defying legal challenges to potentially morph into class-action lawsuits, warning in his own concurrence of the possibility that “the universal injunction will return from the grave under the guise of ‘nationwide class relief.’”
Indeed, the American Civil Liberties Union immediately sued on Friday to block Trump’s attempt to eliminate constitutional birthright citizenship via executive order — in the form of a class-action lawsuit in New Hampshire.
But regardless, the sudden moratorium on nationwide rulings from trial judges is sure to send a flood of cases on a rushed path to the Supreme Court, a prospect already anticipated by Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his own concurrence. But that means the MAGA vision of mass deportations, a vastly reduced federal bureaucracy and sidelining of transgender rights could continue largely unabated until the Supreme Court weighs in.
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.
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