Even with new curbs on their powers, district judges have found ways to broadly halt some administration actions
When the Supreme Court issued a blockbuster decision in June limiting the authority of federal judges to halt Trump administration policies nationwide, the president was quick to pronounce the universal injunction all but dead.
One month later, states, organizations and individuals challenging government actions are finding a number of ways to notch wins against the White House, with judges in a growing list of cases making clear that sweeping relief remains available when they find the government has overstepped its authority.
In at least nine cases, judges have explicitly grappled with the Supreme Court’s opinion and granted nationwide relief anyway. That includes rulings that continue to halt the policy at the center of the high court case: President Trump’s effort to pare back birthright citizenship. Judges have also kept in place protections against deportations for up to 500,000 Haitians, halted mass layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services, and prevented the government from terminating a legal-aid program for mentally ill people in immigration proceedings.
To accomplish this, litigants challenging the administration have used a range of tools, defending the necessity of existing injunctions, filing class-action lawsuits and invoking a law that requires government agencies to act reasonably: the Administrative Procedure Act.
It is a rare point of consensus among conservative and liberal lawyers alike: The path to winning rulings with nationwide application is still wide open.
“There are a number of highly significant court orders that are protecting people as we speak,” said Skye Perryman, president and chief executive of Democracy Forward, a liberal legal group that has brought many cases against the Trump administration. “We’re continuing to get that relief.”
Conservative legal advocates also continue to see nationwide injunctions as viable in some circumstances. “We’re still going to ask for nationwide injunctions when that’s the only option to protect our clients,” said Dan Lennington, a lawyer at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which has challenged race and sex-based preferences in federal policies.
The Supreme Court’s decision was long in the making, with Democratic and Republican administrations in turn chafing against their signature policies being held up by a single district court judge. The 6-3 ruling said that when judges find that the executive branch has acted unlawfully, their injunctions against the government can’t be broader than what is needed to provide complete relief to the parties who sued.
“Many judges with policy disagreements continue to abuse their positions to prevent the President from acting by relying on other laws to provide universal relief,” said Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman. “Regardless of these obstacles, the Trump Administration will continue to aggressively fight for the policies the American people elected him to implement.”
Trump’s birthright policy would deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. unless one of their parents was a citizen or permanent legal resident. Judges in the weeks since the high court decision have ruled that blocking the policy everywhere remains the proper solution.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston again said a ruling with nationwide application was the only way to spare the plaintiffs—a coalition of 20 Democratic-run states and local governments—from harm caused by an executive order he said was unconstitutional. The judge noted that families frequently move across state lines and that children are born in states where their parents don’t reside.
“A patchwork or bifurcated approach to citizenship would generate understandable confusion among state and federal officials administering the various programs,” wrote Sorokin, “as well as similar confusion and fear among the parents of children” who would be denied citizenship by Trump’s order.
In a separate decision last week involving a different group of states that sued Trump, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reached a similar conclusion. Both rulings showed that state attorneys general remain well positioned to win broad injunctions against the federal government when they can demonstrate executive overreach.
“You’ve got these elite litigation shops in the states,” Tennessee’s Republican attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, said of offices such as his. “You’re gonna figure out a way to continue to be one of the most active participants in the judicial system.”
A New Hampshire judge has also blocked Trump’s birthright order after litigants in that case, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, used another pathway the Supreme Court left open: filing class-action lawsuits on behalf of a nationwide group of plaintiffs.
Recent cases also underscore that the Administrative Procedure Act, long a basis for lawsuits against administrations of both parties, remains a potent tool. The law allows judges to set aside agency actions they deem arbitrary, capricious or an abuse of discretion.
Judges have blocked Trump policies in a half-dozen cases in the past month under the APA, and in almost every instance have specifically said they aren’t precluded in doing so by the Supreme Court.
Zach Shelley, a lawyer at the liberal advocacy group Public Citizen, filed a case using the APA in which a judge this month ordered the restoration of gender-related healthcare data to government websites, which officials had taken down after an anti-transgender executive order from Trump.
The act was the obvious choice to address a nationwide policy “from the get-go,” Shelley said.
District Judge John Bates in Washington, D.C., said administration officials ignored common sense by taking down entire webpages of information instead of removing specific words or statements that ran afoul of Trump’s gender order. “This case involves government officials acting first and thinking later,” Bates wrote. Nothing in the high court’s ruling prevented him from ordering the pages be put back up, the judge said.
The Justice Department argued that Trump administration officials had acted lawfully and reasonably in implementing the president’s order to remove material promoting gender ideology.
The department is still in the early stages of attempting to use the Supreme Court’s ruling to its advantage, and legal observers continue to expect the decision will help the administration in some cases.
In one, a New York judge recently narrowed the scope of a ruling blocking the administration’s attempts to end contracts with Job Corps centers that run career-training programs for low-income young adults.
If the lawsuit had instead been filed as a class action or litigated in a different way, though, “the result may very well be different,” Judge Andrew Carter wrote.
