Supreme Court ruled 6-3 district courts cannot issue nationwide injunctions, eliminating key civil rights enforcement tool

On June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Trump v. CASA, Inc. that federal district courts cannot issue "nationwide" or "universal" injunctions — orders that protect people beyond the named plaintiffs in a lawsuit. Justice Barrett, writing for the majority joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh, held that the Judiciary Act of 1789 authorizes courts to grant injunctions only as necessary to provide "complete relief" to the parties before them. The decision produced an immediate practical consequence: Trump's birthright citizenship executive order (EO 14160), which multiple district courts had found unconstitutional, was permitted to partially take effect against non-parties in states without plaintiff states in the litigation, subject to a 30-day pause.

The ruling ends a decades-long practice in which a single federal court could halt enforcement of an unlawful policy nationwide while that policy's legality was litigated — a mechanism civil rights organizations had relied on to protect large populations quickly. Under the new framework, protecting broad populations from an unlawful federal policy requires filing and certifying a class action, a time-intensive process that allows harmful policies to operate against people outside any certified class for months or years while appeals proceed. Justice Sotomayor dissented from the bench — a rare act of protest — warning that "no right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates today," and Justices Kagan and Jackson joined her dissent.

The ruling is a structural reduction of an available civil rights remedy. It does not formally repeal any substantive right but eliminates the procedural mechanism courts have used to protect people from unconstitutional government action at scale. Civil rights organizations must now seek class certification before courts can protect populations beyond named plaintiffs, materially increasing the time and resources required to enforce constitutional protections against federal executive action.